Hard and soft G

Pronunciation of "G" in Latin based orthographies

In the Latin based orthographies of many European languages, the letter is used in different contexts to represent two distinct phonemes that in English are called hard and soft The sound of a hard (which often precedes the non front vowels or a consonant) is usually the voiced velar plosive (as in gain or go) while the sound of a soft (typically before i, e, or y) may be a fricative or affricate, depending on the language. In English, the sound of soft is the affricate , as in general, giant, and gym. A at the end of a word usually renders a hard (as in "rag"), while if a soft rendition is intended it would be followed by a silent (as in "rage").

This alternation has its origins in a historical palatalization of which took place in Late Latin, and led to a change in the pronunciation of the sound before the front vowels and Later, other languages not descended from Latin, such as English, inherited this feature as an orthographic convention. The Scandinavian languages, however, have undergone their shift independently.

In Modern Greek, which uses the Greek alphabet, the Greek letter gamma (uppercase: ; lowercase: ) – which is ancestral to the Roman letters and – has "soft type" and "hard type" pronunciations, though Greek speakers do not use such a terminology. The "soft" pronunciation (that is, the voiced palatal fricative ) occurs before and (both which represent ), and before , , , , and (which all represent ). In other instances, the "hard" pronunciation (that is, the voiced velar fricative ) occurs. In the Russian alphabet (a variant of Cyrillic), represents both hard (твёрдый ) and soft (мягкий ) pronunciations, and , respectively. The soft pronunciation of occurs before any of the "softening" vowels and the hard pronunciation occurs elsewhere. However, the letter functions as a "soft g" in the Romance sense, with alterations between and common in the language (e. g. ложиться, "to lie (down)", past tense лёг; подруга, "girlfriend", diminutive подружка). In other Slavic languages, there are similar phenomena involving (or ) and (or ). In Modern Hebrew, which uses the Hebrew alphabet, the letter gimel typically has the sound within Hebrew words, although in some Sephardic dialects, it represents or when written with a dagesh (i. e., a dot placed inside the letter: ), and when without a dagesh. An apostrophe like symbol called a Geresh can be added immediately to the left of a gimel (i. e., ) to indicate that the gimel represents an affricate ).