LJ (digraph)

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Lj in upper- and lowercase
Lj in upper- and lowercase
See LJ for other meanings.

Lj (lj in lower case) is a letter present in some Slavic languages, such as the Latin version of Serbo-Croatian and in romanised Macedonian, where it is pronounced (IPA) /ʎ/. For example, the word "ljiljan" is pronounced /ʎiʎan/. Most languages containing the letter Lj in the alphabet are phonetic, 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. Like its Latin counterpart, the Cyrillic alphabet has a specific symbol for the same sound: Љ.

The same sound appears in Italian as gl, in some variants of Spanish and Catalan as ll, in Portuguese as lh, in Hungarian as lly and in Latvian as . In Czech and Slovak, it is often transcribed as l' (used more frequently on the latter language).

Ljudevit Gaj first used this digraph in 1830.

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