Home › Multilingual Archive Index › Ĵ

Ĵ

Ĵ or ĵ (J circumflex) is a consonant in Esperanto orthography, representing a voiced postalveolar fricative (either palato-alveolar or retroflex), and is equivalent to the voiced postalveolar fricative, IPA: [ʒ], or the voiced retroflex fricative, [ʐ].

While Esperanto orthography uses a diacritic for its four postalveolar consonants, as do the Latin-based Slavic alphabets, the base letters are Romano-Germanic. Ĵ is based on the French letter j to better preserve the shape of borrowings from that language (such as ĵurnalo from journal) than Slavic ž would.

See also

• Ĉ
• Ĝ
• Ĥ
• Ŝ
• Ŭ