Lje (Љ љ; italics: ''Љ љ'') is a letter of the

Cyrillic script The Cyrillic script ( ), Slavonic script or the Slavic script, is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking co ...

. Lje represents a

palatal lateral The voiced palatal lateral approximant is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , a rotated lowercase letter (not to be confused with lowercas ...

, a sound similar (but not identical) to the palatalized

alveolar lateral The voiced alveolar lateral approximant is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents dental, alveolar, and postalveolar lateral approximants is , and the equ ...

, which is in some languages represented by the digraph ⟨ль⟩ and pronounced like the in "million". Compare Latvian ⟨ļ⟩, Slovak ⟨ľ⟩, Portuguese ⟨lh⟩, Spanish ⟨ll⟩ and Italian ⟨gl⟩. Lje is a

ligature Ligature may refer to: * Ligature (medicine), a piece of suture used to shut off a blood vessel or other anatomical structure ** Ligature (orthodontic), used in dentistry * Ligature (music), an element of musical notation used especially in the me ...

of ⟨ л⟩ and ⟨ ь⟩.Maretić, Tomislav. ''Gramatika i stilistika hrvatskoga ili srpskoga književnog jezika''. 1899. It was invented by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić for use in his 1818 dictionary, replacing the earlier digraph ⟨ль⟩. It corresponds to the digraph in

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 ...

for

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 ...

. It is today used in Macedonian, variants of

when written in Cyrillic ( Bosnian, Montenegrin and Serbian), and

Itelmen The Itelmens ( Itelmen: Итәнмән, russian: Ительмены) are an indigenous ethnic group of the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia. The Itelmen language is distantly related to Chukchi and Koryak, forming the Chukotko-Kamchatkan langu ...

. Lje is commonly transliterated as but it can also be transliterated as , or .

Related letters and other similar characters

*Л л : Cyrillic letter El *Ь ь : Cyrillic letter Soft sign *Ll :

Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Can ...

double L in the absence of

Yeísmo ''Yeísmo'' (; literally "Y-ism") is a distinctive feature of certain dialects of the Spanish language, characterized by the loss of the traditional palatal lateral approximant phoneme (written ) and its merger into the phoneme (written ), ...

*Ľ ľ : Latin letter L with caron - a Slovak letter *Ĺ ĺ : Latin letter L with acute - another Slovak letter *Ļ ļ : Latin letter L with cedilla - a Latvian letter *Ly :

Hungarian ly Ly is a digraph of the Latin alphabet, used in Hungarian. Usage ''Ly'' is the twentieth letter of the Hungarian alphabet. Its Hungarian name is ''elipszilon'' . Now, it can represent the same phoneme (palatal approximant) as the Hungarian ...

*Њ њ : Cyrillic letter Nje

Computing codes

References

External links

* *
Audio samples
of the letter Lje Cyrillic ligatures Serbian letters {{Cyrillic-alphabet-stub