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On a related question, the OP points out that the grapheme j has a variety of pronunciations throughout various languages: as [ʒ] in French, [j] in German, and [x] in Spanish. Does any other language pronounce using the voiced postalveolar affricate [dʒ]?

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Lou
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  • Are you asking about spelling or about phonology? – fdb Oct 09 '14 at 11:45
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    Phonetics, I think. I want to know which languages articulate the grapheme j using the voiced postalveolar affricate. – Lou Oct 09 '14 at 11:54
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    I think you are asking which scripts use the grapheme "j" to represent the phoneme [dʒ]. That is a question about orthography, not phonetics. – fdb Oct 09 '14 at 11:57
  • Surely they're two sides of the same coin. I'm either asking which writing systems write [dʒ] as j, or which phonologies pronounce j as [dʒ]. – Lou Oct 09 '14 at 12:06
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    No, they're not two sides of the same coin. A language may have several different orthographies, or none, without affecting its phonology (or phonetics). I suspect @fdb is pressing the point, as I would, because non-specialists often confuse a language with its script. – Colin Fine Oct 09 '14 at 22:55

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'J' stands for /dʒ/ in Indonesian, Somali, Malay, Igbo, Shona, Oromo, Turkmen, and Zulu. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J

Yellow Sky
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    All, of course, in imitation of English spelling. Until recently Indonesian used "dj" for [dʒ], following Dutch orthography, before adopting the English-based orthography of Malay. – fdb Oct 09 '14 at 11:47
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    @fdb -Yes, but the question was about the names of languages, so here they are. – Yellow Sky Oct 09 '14 at 11:54
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    Are you suggesting that [dʒ] was an English "invention", @fdb? If you're willing to provide more context on this, it would make a great answer. – Lou Oct 09 '14 at 11:55
  • Where did I say it was an English invention? – fdb Oct 09 '14 at 15:25
  • You didn't, but you said that each of the languages Yellow Sky listed were derived or imitated from English. I inferred from this that English first mapped j -> [dʒ], and some other languages derived this. – Lou Oct 09 '14 at 16:32
  • In the standard Roman transliteration of Sanskrit, Hindi, and other Indian languages, J is used for the letter ज (and its variant allographs in different Indian abugidas), which represents the palatal affricate /tʃ/. India and Malaysia were British colonies, and English spelling conventions are widespread. – jlawler Oct 09 '14 at 16:35
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    Are you sure of that, John? I thought it generally represented a voiced palatal. – Colin Fine Oct 09 '14 at 23:00
  • Sorry, my mistake; /dʒ/ is the voiced palatal represented by ज. Thanks, @Colin. – jlawler Oct 09 '14 at 23:19
  • What language distinguishes [ʒ] from [ʑ]? If none, then Hepburn romanization of Japanese uses for [dʑ] in imitation of English. – Damian Yerrick Oct 10 '14 at 03:02
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    @tepples - Russian distinguishes [ʑ] from [ʒ:]. – Yellow Sky Oct 12 '14 at 07:14
  • @ Leo King: The use of j for [dʒ], like the use of ch for [tʃ], was not original to English; English took this spelling convention from French, which used to have the sounds [tʃ] and [dʒ]. – brass tacks Jan 22 '15 at 22:58
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In some Romanizations of Armenian, "j" is used for the letter ջ, which is pronounced [dʒ] in Eastern Armenian, or for ճ, pronounced [dʒ] in Western.

These Armenian letters are also sometimes transcribed (especially in older texts) using "j^", i.e., "j" with a hachek instead of a dot. In this case, the regular "j" (with a dot) would be used for the sound [dz], as represented by ձ in Eastern and ծ in Western. (Incidentally, I don't know of any other case where "j" has been used to represent [dz], but for some reason it was chosen in this case.)

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