Sh (digraph)
Sh is a digraph of the Latin alphabet, a combination of S and H.
European languages
English
In English, sh usually represents [ʃ]. The exception is in compound words, where the s and h are not a digraph, but pronounced separately, e.g. hogshead is hogs-head /ˈhɒɡz.hɛd/, not *hog-shead /ˈhɒɡ.ʃɛd/. Sh is not considered a distinct letter for collation purposes.
American Literary braille includes a single-cell contraction for the digraph with the dot pattern (1 4 6). It stands for the word "shall" in isolation.
Spanish
In Spanish, the combination appears in compound words such as deshecho, mainly combinations of prefix des- and a word beginning with h; in these cases it is not a digraph, as the letter s is pronounced normally, i.e., [s], and the h is silent as usual. In normative Spanish the "sh" is pronounced like an "s" always.
Albanian
In Albanian, sh represents [ʃ]. It is considered a distinct letter, named shë, and placed between S and T in the albanian alphabet.
German
In German, sh is used to transliterate Cyrillic ⟨ж⟩, pronounced as /ʐ/ in Russian. It is often replaced with trigraph sch, which normally represents [ʃ].
Irish
In Irish sh is pronounced [h] and represents the lenition of s; for example mo shaol [mə hiːɫ] "my life" (cf. saol [sˠiːɫ] "life").
Occitan
In Occitan, sh represents [ʃ]. It mostly occurs in the Gascon dialect of Occitan and corresponds with s or ss in other Occitan dialects: peish = peis "fish", naishença = naissença "birth", sheis = sièis "six". A i before sh is silent: peish, naishença are pronounced [ˈpeʃ, naˈʃensɔ]. Some words have sh in all Occitan dialects: they are Gascon words adopted in all the Occitan language (Aush "Auch", Arcaishon "Arcachon") or foreign borrowings (shampó "shampoo").
For s·h, see Interpunct#Occitan.
Other languages
Uyghur
Sh represents the sound [ʃ] in the Uyghur Latin script. It is considered a separate letter, and is the 14th letter of the alphabet.
Uzbek
In Uzbek, the letter sh represents [ʃ]. It is the 27th letter of the Uzbek alphabet.
Romanization
In the Pinyin, Wade-Giles, and Yale romanizations of Chinese, sh represents retroflex [ʂ]. It contrasts with [ɕ], which is written x in Pinyin, hs in Wade-Giles, and sy in Yale.
In the Hepburn romanization of Japanese, sh represents [ɕ]. Other romanizations write [ɕ] as s before i and sy before other vowels.