A hard g vs a soft g is a feature that occurs in many languages, including English, in which there are two sounds both represented by the letter "g". A hard g is a velar stop /g/ represented by "g", and a soft g is an affricate /dʒ/ or a fricative /ʒ/ or something else represented by "g", too. The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... A velar stop or velar plosive is a type of consonant. ... An affricate is a consonant that begins like a stop (most often an alveovelar, such as [t] or [d]) and that doesnt have a release of its own, but opens directly into a fricative (or, in one language, into a trill). ... Note: This page contains phonetic information presented in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) using Unicode. ...

English

In English, the hard g is the sound of the "g" /g/ in "get", "give" and "gallon", as distinct from the soft "g" /dʒ/ in "gentle" and "giant". In words of romance origin, the soft g occurs before the letters "e", "i" and "y" , while the hard "g" occurs in other positions. In words of Germanic origin, the g is usually hard. The Romance languages (sometimes referred to as Romanic languages) are a branch of the Indo-European language family, comprising all the languages that descend from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. ...

Other languages

All modern Romance languages make this distinction, except a few that have undergone spelling reforms such as Ladino or Haitian Creole. The soft g occurs before "e", "i" and "y" and is is pronounced /dʒ/ in Italian and Romanian, /ʒ/ in French, Portuguese and Catalan, and /x/ in Spanish. The hard g ocurs in all other positions and is pronounced /g/ (or an allophone of it) in all these languages. Ladino is a Romance language, derived mainly from Old Castilian (Spanish), Hebrew, Turkish and some French and Greek. ... Haitian Creole (Kreyòl ayisyen) is a creole language based on the French language. ... Catalan IPA: (català IPA: or []) is a Romance language, the national language of Andorra, and a co-official language in the Spanish autonomous communities of Balearic Islands, Catalonia and Valencia (in the latter with the name of Valencian), and in the city of LAlguer in the Italian island of... In phonetics, an allophone is one of several similar phones that belong to the same phoneme. ...

The phoneme /g/ can occur before "e", "i" and "y" by putting a "u" after it (e.g. French "gentil" /ʒɑ̃ti/, "guerre" /gɛʁ/). In Italian and Romanian, an h is used instead of a u for the same purpose (e.g. Italian "laghi" /lagi/, Romanian ghid /gid/). Conversely, the phoneme /ʒ/ can occur before "a" or "o" by putting an "e" or "i" after it (e.g. French "mangeons" /mɑ̃ʒɔ̃/, Italian giorno /dʒorno/, Romanian geam /dʒam/, ). In human language, a phoneme is the theoretical representation of a sound. ...

In Luganda, "g" has a hard form /g/ that occurs before "a", "e", "o", "u" and "w", and a soft "g" /dʒ/ which occurs before "i" and "y". To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...

History

The soft g first appeared in Vulgar Latin by palatalization. Vulgar Latin, as in this political graffito at Pompeii, was the speech of ordinary people of the Roman Empire — different from the classical Latin used by the Roman elite. ...

References

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