Lj (lj in
lower case) is a letter present in some
Slavic language
The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, spoken during the Ea ...
s, such as the Latin version of
Serbo-Croatian
Serbo-Croatian () – also called Serbo-Croat (), Serbo-Croat-Bosnian (SCB), Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), and Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS) – is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia an ...
and in romanised
Macedonian, where it represents a
palatal lateral approximant . For example, the word ' is pronounced . Most languages containing the letter in the alphabet are phonemic, which means that every symbol represents one sound, and is always pronounced the same way. In this case, joining the letters ''
L'' and ''
J'' creates a new letter or a sound. The digraph is treated as a single letter, and therefore it has its own place in the
alphabet
An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllab ...
, takes up only one space in crossword puzzles and is written in line in vertical text. However, it is not found on standard computer keyboards. Like its
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
counterpart, the
Cyrillic alphabet
, bg, кирилица , mk, кирилица , russian: кириллица , sr, ћирилица, uk, кирилиця
, fam1 = Egyptian hieroglyphs
, fam2 = Proto-Sinaitic
, fam3 = Phoenician
, fam4 = Gr ...
has a specific symbol for the same sound:
Љ.
In sentence case, only ''L'' is capitalized.
The same sound appears in Italian spelled with , in some variants of Spanish and Catalan as , in Portuguese as , in some Hungarian dialects as and in
Latvian as . In
Czech
Czech may refer to:
* Anything from or related to the Czech Republic, a country in Europe
** Czech language
** Czechs, the people of the area
** Czech culture
** Czech cuisine
* One of three mythical brothers, Lech, Czech, and Rus'
Places
* Czech, ...
and
Slovak, it is often transcribed as (it is used more frequently on the latter language).
Ljudevit Gaj first proposed this digraph in 1835.
See also
*
Љ, the Cyrillic version of Lj
*
Gaj's Latin alphabet
Gaj's Latin alphabet ( sh-Latn-Cyrl, Gajeva latinica, separator=" / ", Гајева латиница}, ), also known as ( sh-Cyrl, абецеда, ) or ( sh-Cyrl, гајица, link=no, ), is the form of the Latin script used for writing Serb ...
References
External links
Audio samplesof the letter ''LJ''
{{Latin script
Latin-script digraphs
Serbo-Croatian language