Ğ

Ğ (g with breve; minuscule: ğ) is a Latin letter found in the Turkish and Azerbaijani alphabets as well as the Latin alphabets of Zazaki, Laz, Crimean Tatar, Tatar, and Kazakh. It traditionally represented the voiced velar fricative /ɣ/ or the voiced uvular fricative /ʁ/. However, in Turkish, the phoneme has in most cases been reduced to a silent letter, serving as a vowel-lengthener. But for Crimean Tatar spelling in Romania it represents the voiced palato-alveolar affricate /d͡ʒ/.

In Turkish, the ⟨ğ⟩ is known as yumuşak ge (pronounced [jumuˈʃak ˈɟe]; 'soft g') and is the ninth letter of the Turkish alphabet. It always follows a vowel, and can be compared to the blødt g ('soft g') in Danish.

Similarly to Azerbaijani, Crimean Tatar and other Turkic languages, Turkish used to have a /ɣ/ phoneme which could occur in all positions. However, the phoneme was gradually lost as it fortified to a /g/ if not preceded by a vowel and eroded away elsewhere. The fortified form is now written with a ⟨g⟩, while the eroded form is shown with a ⟨ğ⟩; showing that in native Turkish words which have vowels in contact with each other, there used to be a consonant separating them (in fact Turkish language resources will still insist native words do not have consecutive vowels). In loanwords, consecutive vowels are not separated with a ğ, but in speech they may be separated by a glottal stop, e.g. cemaat or cemaât, which may be pronounced as either [dʒeˈma.atʲ] or [dʒeˈmaʔatʲ].) (To point it out cemaat is an arabic word not with turkish origin.)

The realization of the phoneme depends on its location in a word and the surrounding vowels:

Some webpages may use ⟨Ð⟩ (uppercase) and ⟨ð⟩ (lowercase) for ⟨Ğ⟩ because of improper encoding; see Turkish characters for the reasons of this.

The letter, and its counterpart in the Ottoman Turkish alphabet, ⟨غ⟩, were once pronounced as a consonant, /ɣ/, the voiced velar fricative, until very recently in the history of Turkish, but it has undergone a sound change by which the consonant was completely lost and compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel occurred, hence its function today. The sound change has not completely eliminated the sound in some Turkish dialects. The previous consonantal nature of the sound is evinced by earlier English loanwords from Turkish, such as yogurt/yoghurt (modern Turkish yoğurt) and agha (modern Turkish ağa), and the corresponding velar fricative found in cognate words in the closely related Azerbaijani language and the Turkish-influenced Crimean Tatar language. In Old Turkic (as well as earlier during Proto-Turkic times), this voiced velar fricative originated as an allophone of /ɡ/, the voiced velar stop, when it occurred intervocalically. The expected process of lenition (weakening and eventual loss of the intervocalic Proto-Turkic consonant *ɡ) is thus complete in Turkish and underway in many other Common Turkic languages.

In Azerbaijani ⟨ğ⟩ represents /ɣ/, the voiced velar fricative. In Azerbaijani, ğ never occurs at the beginning of a word.

In Crimean Tatar, ⟨ğ⟩ represents /ɣ/ the voiced velar fricative.