The letter () is preferred in the
Levant (nowadays), and by
Aljazeera TV channel, to represent , e.g., (Hong Kong), (
Portugal), (August), and (
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, 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 is pronounced as in all situations even in Modern Standard Arabic (except in certain contexts, such as
reciting the Qur'an), is used to transcribe foreign in all contexts. The same applies to coastal
Yemen, as well as
Oman. In
Algeria and
Tunisia, it is () or a three-dotted
qāf (); the
Arabian peninsula, it is (). In Iraq,
gaf () or
kaf () is more used. In Morocco, a three-dotted
kāf () or
kāf () is used. In
Lebanon and Israel, a three-dotted
jīm () is often used to create the phoneme in names and foreign loanwords, such as in (
Gambia). When representing the sound in transliteration of Arabic into Hebrew, it is written as or . In English, the letter in Arabic names is usually transliterated as , , or simply
g: '
Baghdad', '
Kyrgyzstan', 'Singapore', or '
Gaza', the last of which does not render the sound ~ accurately. The closest equivalent sound to be known to most English-speakers is the
Parisian French "
r" . The
Maltese alphabet is written in the
Latin alphabet, the only Semitic language to do so in its
standard form, and uses ⟨
g⟩. It is usually represented as
voiced velar plosive.
Turkish ğ, which in modern speech has no sound of its own (similar to the soft
g in
Danish and the
hard and the
soft signs in Russian), used to be spelled as غ in the
Ottoman script and pronounced as . Other
Turkic languages also use this Latin equivalent of ghayn (ğ), such as
Tatar (Cyrillic: г), which pronounces it as [ʁ], and
Azerbaijani (Cyrillic: ғ, Perso-Arabic: غ), which pronounces it as . In Arabic words and names where there is an ayin, Tatar adds the ghayn instead (عبد الله, ʻ
Abd Allāh, ’Abdullah; Tatar:
Ğabdulla
, Габдулла;
Yaña imlâ: غابدوللا /
ʁabdulla/). == Related characters ==