G - Usage

Usage

In English, the letter appears alone or in digraphs. Alone it represents

• a voiced velar plosive (/ɡ/ or "hard G"), as in goose, gargoyle and game;
• a voiced palato-alveolar affricate (/dʒ/ or "soft G"), as in giant, ginger and geology or
• a voiced palato-alveolar sibilant (/ʒ/) in some words of French origin, such as rouge, beige and genre.

The digraph ⟨dg⟩ represents

• a voiced palato-alveolar affricate (/dʒ/) as in bridge or judge.

The digraph ⟨ng⟩ represents either

• a velar nasal (/ŋ/) as in length and sing or
• a consonant cluster of the latter with the hard G (/ŋg/) as in jungle and finger

The digraph ⟨gh⟩ (which mostly came about when the letter yogh was removed from the alphabet taking various values including /ɡ/, /ɣ/, /x/ and /j/) now represents great variety of values, including

• /f/ in enough,
• /ɡ/ in loan words like spaghetti and
• as an indicator of a letter's "long" pronunciation in words like sigh and night or
• it may be silent as in eight and plough.

The digraph ⟨gn⟩ may represent

• /nj/, also common in loanwords, as in lasagna or
• initially or finally, simply /n/ as in gnome and sign.

In words of Romance origin, ⟨g⟩ is usually soft before ⟨e⟩, ⟨i⟩, and ⟨y⟩ and hard otherwise, although it is soft in algae, gaol, margarine, and an alternative pronunciation of vegan. While the soft value of ⟨g⟩ varies in different Romance languages (/ʒ/ in French and Portuguese, in Catalan, /d͡ʒ/ in Italian and Romanian, and /x/ in Castilian Spanish, and /h/ in other dialects of Spanish), in all except Romanian and Italian, soft ⟨g⟩ has the same pronunciation as the ⟨j⟩.

In Italian and Romanian, ⟨gh⟩ is used to represent /ɡ/ before front vowels where ⟨g⟩ would otherwise represent a soft value. In Italian and French, ⟨gn⟩ is used to represent the palatal nasal /ɲ/, a sound somewhat similar to the ⟨ny⟩ in English canyon. In Italian, the trigraph ⟨gli⟩, when appearing before a vowel, represents the palatal lateral approximant /ʎ/; in the definite article and pronoun gli /ʎi/, the digraph ⟨gl⟩ represents the same sound.

There are many English words of non-Romance origin where ⟨g⟩ is hard though followed by ⟨e⟩ or ⟨i⟩ (e.g. get, gift), and a few in which ⟨g⟩ is soft though followed by ⟨a⟩ (margarine). Non-Romance languages typically use ⟨g⟩ to represent /ɡ/ regardless of position.

Amongst European languages Dutch is an exception as it does not have /ɡ/ in its native words, and instead ⟨g⟩ represents a voiced velar fricative /ɣ/, a sound that does not occur in modern English. Faroese uses ⟨g⟩ to represent /dʒ/, in addition to /ɡ/, and also uses it to indicate a glide.

In Maori (Te Reo Māori), ⟨g⟩ is used in the combination ⟨ng⟩ which represents the velar nasal /ŋ/ and is pronounced like the ⟨ng⟩ in singer.

In older Czech and Slovak orthographies, ⟨g⟩ was used to represent /j/, while /ɡ/ was written as ⟨ǧ⟩ (g with caron).