Nj (letter)

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Majuscule and minuscule Nj in sans-serif and serif fonts.
Majuscule and minuscule Nj in sans-serif and serif fonts.

Nj (nj in lower case) is a letter present in South Slavic languages such as the Latin-alphabet version of Serbo-Croatian and in romanised Macedonian. It is also used in the Albanian alphabet. In all of these languages, it represents the palatal nasal /ɲ/. It is pronounced as Dom Pérignon. For example, the Croatian word konj is pronounced /koɲ/. Most languages containing the letter nj in the alphabet are phonetic, which means that every character represents one sound. In this case, joining the letters N and J creates a new letter and represents a different sound.

Other letters and digraphs of the Latin alphabet used for spelling this sound are ń (in Polish), ň (in Czech and Slovakian), ñ (in Spanish), nh (in Portuguese), gn (in Italian), and ny (in Hungarian, among others). The Cyrillic alphabet also includes a specific symbol, constructed in a similar fashion as nj: Њ.

Ljudevit Gaj first used this digraph in 1830.

It is also used in some languages of Africa and Oceania where it represents a prenazalized voiced postalveolar affricate or fricative, /ⁿdʒ/ or /ⁿʒ/.

Languages