Ĝ
Ĝ
Latin letter G with circumflex, used in Esperanto
Ĝ or ĝ (G circumflex) is a consonant in Esperanto orthography, representing a voiced postalveolar affricate (either palato-alveolar or retroflex), and is equivalent to a voiced postalveolar affricate /dʒ/ or a voiced retroflex affricate /dʐ/.
While Esperanto orthography uses a diacritic for its four postalveolar consonants, as do the Latin-based Slavic alphabets, the base letters are Romano-Germanic. Ĝ is based on the letter g, which has this sound in English and Italian before the vowels i and e (with some exceptions in English), to better preserve the shape of borrowings from those languages (such as ĝenerala from general) than Slavic đ (Serbo-Croatian) or dž would.[1]
Ĝ is the ninth letter in Esperanto orthography. Although it is written as gx and gh respectively in the x-system and h-system workarounds, it is normally written as G with a circumflex: ĝ.
