The grapheme Ž (minuscule: ž) is formed from Latin Z with the addition of háček. It is used in various contexts, usually denoting the voiced postalveolar fricative /ʒ/, including phonetic transcription. This sound is similar to English g in genre or Portuguese and French j. In Unicode, Ž and ž are U+017D and U+017E respectively.
Apart from Estonian and Turkmen, Ž is the final letter of most alphabets that contain it.
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Origin
The symbol originates with the 15th century Czech alphabet as introduced by the reforms of Jan Hus. It was also used for the closely related Slovak language. From Czech, it was adopted into the Belarusian Łacinka alphabet, Croatian alphabet by Ljudevit Gaj in 1830, and then into Slovenian and Bosnian alphabets.
Uses
Slavic languages
It is the 42nd letter of the Czech, the 46th letter of Slovak, the 36th letter of Belarusian Łacinka alphabet, the 25th letter of the Slovenian alphabet, the 30th letter of the Serbian Latin, Croatian and Bosnian scripts. It is also used in both Sorbian languages.
In addition, the character is typically used as a transliteration of Cyrillic Ж in Serbian (8th position), Macedonian (in 8th position), occasionally in Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian and even less frequently in Bulgarian.
For most languages it represents voiced postalveolar fricative /ʒ/ except in Russian transliterations of Ж where it represents voiced retroflex fricative /ʐ/.
Baltic languages
It is the 32nd letter of the Lithuanian and 33rd letter of the Latvian alphabets.
Finno-Ugric languages
It is the 19th letter of the Estonian, where it is used in loan words, and the 29th letter of the Northern Sami alphabet. It also features occasionally in Finnish but is not part of the regular alphabet.
Other languages
- It is the 27th and last letter of the Songhay alphabet.
- It is also used in the standard orthography of the Lakota language.
See also
References
- Pullum, Geoffrey K.; Ladusaw, William A. (1996). Phonetic Symbol Guide. University of Chicago Press. p. 203.
| The Basic modern Latin alphabet | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Aa | Bb | Cc | Dd | Ee | Ff | Gg | Hh | Ii | Jj | Kk | Ll | Mm | Nn | Oo | Pp | Rr | Ss | Tt | Uu | Vv | Ww | Xx | Yy | Zz | |
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Letter Z with diacritics
Letters using caron sign
history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters • ISO/IEC 646 |
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