The Arabic**** letter**** ' (, **' or **** ) is on**e of**** the six letters the Arabic**** alphabet**** added to**** the twenty****-two inherited from**** the Phoenician**** alphabet**** (the**** others**** being,**** , , , ).**** It represents the sound or. In name and shape, it is a variant of ʻayn. Its numerical value is 1000 (see Abjad numerals). In the Persian language, it represents ~ and is the twenty-second letter in the new Persian alphabet. is written in several ways depending on its position in the word:

History

Proto-Semitic (usually reconstructed as voiced velar fricative or voiced uvular fricative ) merged with ʻayn in most Semitic languages except for Arabic, Ugaritic, and older varieties of the Canaanite languages. The South Arabian alphabet retained a symbol for,. Biblical Hebrew, as of the 3rd century BCE, apparently still distinguished the phonemes and , based on transcriptions in the Septuagint, such as that of the name "Gomorrah" as Gomorras (Γομορραν) for the Hebrew ‘Ămōrā (עֲמֹרָה). Canaanite languages, including Hebrew, later also merged with ʻayin, and the merger was complete in Tiberian Hebrew.

Usage

The letter (غ) is preferred in the Levant (nowadays), and by Aljazeera TV channel, to represent, e.g., هونغ كونغ (Hong Kong), البرتغال (Portugal), أغسطس (August), and غاندالف (Gandalf). Foreign publications and TV channels in Arabic, e.g. Deutsche Welle, and Alhurra, follow this practice. It is then often pronounced, not , though in many cases, غ is pronounced in loanwords as expected (, not ). Other letters can be used to transcribe in loanwords and names, depending on whether the local variety of Arabic in the country has the phoneme, and if it does, which letter represents it, and whether it is customary in the country to use that letter to transcribe. For instance, in Egypt, where ج is pronounced as in all situations, even in speaking Modern Standard Arabic (except in certain contexts, such as reciting the Qur'an), ج is used to transcribe foreign in all contexts. The same applies to coastal Yemen, as well as southwestern and eastern Oman. In Algerian Arabic, Hejazi Arabic and Najdi Arabic it is qāf. In Iraq, gaf is more used. In Morocco, gāf or kāf is used. In Tunisia and Algeria, or qāf is used. When representing the sound in transliteration of Arabic into Hebrew, it is written as ע׳. In English, the letter غ in Arabic names is usually transliterated as, , or simply g: بغداد 'Baghdad', قرغيزستان 'Kyrgyzstan', سنغافورة 'Singapore', or غزة 'Gaza', the latter of which does not render the sound ~ accurately. The closest equivalent sound to be known to most English-speakers is the Parisian French "r". In the Maltese alphabet which is written in the Latin alphabet, the only [Semitic language](https://bliptext.com/articles/semitic-lan[g](https://bliptext.com/articles/g)ua[g](https://bliptext.com/articles/g)e) to do so in its standard form, writes the ghayn as ⟨g⟩. It is usually represented as voiced velar plosive. Turkish ğ, which in modern speech has no sound of its own, used to be spelled as غ in the Ottoman script. Other Turkic languages also use this Latin equivalent of ghayn (ğ), such as Tatar (Cyrillic: г), which pronounces it as [ʁ]. In Arabic words and names where there's an ayin, Tatar adds the ghayn instead (عبد الله, ʻAbd Allāh, ’Abdullah; Tatar: Ğabdulla, Габдулла; Yaña imlâ: غابدوللا /ʁabdulla/).

Related characters

For the related characters, see ng (Arabic letter) and ayin.

Character encodings