The modern lowercase 'g' has two typographic variants: the single-story (sometim

es opentail) 'Opentail g.svg' and the double-story (sometimes looptail) 'Looptai

l g.svg'. The single-story form derives from the majuscule (uppercase) form by r
aising the serif that distinguishes it from 'c' to the top of the loop, thus clo
sing the loop, and extending the vertical stroke downward and to the left. The d
ouble-story form (g) had developed similarly, except that some ornate forms then
extended the tail back to the right, and to the left again, forming a closed bo
wl or loop. The initial extension to the right was absorbed into the upper close
d bowl. The double-story version became popular when printing switched to "Roman
type" because the tail was effectively shorter, making it possible to put more
lines on a page. In the double-story version, a small top stroke in the upper-ri
ght, often terminating in an orb shape, is called an "ear".
Generally, the two forms are complementary, but occasionally the difference has
been exploited to provide contrast. The 1949 Principles of the International Pho
netic Association recommends using Opentail g.svg for advanced voiced velar plos
ives (denoted by Latin small letter script G) and Looptail g.svg for regular one
s where the two are contrasted, but this suggestion was never accepted by phonet
icians in general,[5] and today 'Opentail g.svg' is the symbol used in the Inter
national Phonetic Alphabet, with 'Looptail g.svg' acknowledged as an acceptable
variant and more often used in printed materials.[5]
Use in writing systems
See also: Hard and soft G
English
In English, the letter appears either alone or in some digraphs. Alone, it repre
sents
a voiced velar plosive (/g/ or "hard" ?g?), as in goose, gargoyle and game;
a voiced palato-alveolar affricate (/d?/ or "soft" ?g?), generally before ?i
? or ?e?, as in giant, ginger and geology or
a voiced palato-alveolar sibilant (/?/) in some words of French origin, such
as rouge, beige and genre.
In words of Romance origin, ?g? is mainly soft before ?e? (including the digraph
s ?ae? and ?oe?), ?i?, and ?y? and hard otherwise. There are many English words
of non-Romance origin where ?g? is hard though followed by ?e? or ?i? (e.g. get,
gift), and a few in which ?g? is soft though followed by ?a? such as gaol or ma
rgarine.
The digraph ?dg? represents
a voiced palato-alveolar affricate (/d?/) as in bridge or judge.
The digraph ?ng? represents either
a velar nasal (/?/) as in length and sing, or
a consonant cluster of the latter with the hard ?g? (/?g/) as in jungle and
finger, or
a consonant cluster of /nd?/, as in sponge or binge.
The digraph ?gh? (which mostly came about when the letter Yogh, which took vario
us values including /g/, /?/, /x/ and /j/, was removed from the alphabet) now re
presents a great variety of values, including
/g/ word-initially and in loan words like spaghetti
as an indicator of a letter's "long" pronunciation in words like sigh and ni
ght
silent as in eight and plough

/f/ in enough
between two vowels, a simple cluster of /gh/ as in pigheaded
The digraph ?gn? may represent
initially, /n/ as in gnome and gnostic
finally, /n/ with a preceding "long" vowel as in sign
between two vowels, a simple cluster of /gn/ as in signature
/nj/ in loanwords such as lasagna
Other languages
Most Romance languages and some Nordic languages also have two main pronunciatio
ns for ?g?, hard and soft. While the soft value of ?g? varies in different Roman
ce languages (/?/ in French and Portuguese, [(d)?] in Catalan, /d??/ in Italian
and Romanian, and /x/ in most dialects of Spanish), in all except Romanian and I
talian, soft ?g? has the same pronunciation as the ?j?.
In Italian and Romanian, ?gh? is used to represent /g/ before front vowels where
?g? would otherwise represent a soft value. In Italian and French, ?gn? is used
to represent the palatal nasal /?/, a sound somewhat similar to the ?ny? in Eng
lish canyon. In Italian, the trigraph ?gli?, when appearing before a vowel or as
the article and pronoun gli, represents the palatal lateral approximant /?/.
Other languages typically use ?g? to represent /g/ regardless of position.
Amongst European languages Dutch is an exception as it does not have /g/ in its
native words, and instead ?g? represents a voiced velar fricative /?/, a sound t
hat does not occur in modern English, but there is a dialectal variation: many N
etherlandic dialects use a voiceless fricative ([x] or [?]) instead, and in sout
hern dialects it may be palatalized to [?]. Nevertheless, word-finally it is alw
ays voiceless in all dialects, including the standard Dutch of Belgium and the N
etherlands. On the other hand, some dialects (like Amelands), may have a phonemi
c /g/.
Faroese uses ?g? to represent /d?/, in addition to /g/, and also uses it to indi
cate a glide.
In Maori (Te Reo Maori), ?g? is used in the digraph ?ng? which represents the ve
lar nasal /?/ and is pronounced like the ?ng? in singer.
In older Czech and Slovak orthographies, ?g? was used to represent /j/, while /g
/ was written as ?g? (?g? with caron).
Related characters
Ancestors, descendants and siblings
?? : Semitic letter Gimel, from which the following symbols originally deriv
e
C c : Latin letter C, from which G derives
G ? : Greek letter Gamma, from which C derives in turn
g: Latin letter script small G
? ? : Cyrillic letter Ge
? ? : Latin letter Yogh
? ? : Latin letter Gamma
? : Latin letter small capital G, used in the International Phonetic Alphabe
t to represent a voiced uvular stop
G with diacritics: G g G g G g G g ? ? G g
Ligatures and abbreviations

? : Paraguayan guaran
Computing codes
Character
G
g
Unicode name
LATIN CAPITAL LETTER G
Encodings
decimal
hex
Unicode
71
U+0047 103
UTF-8 71
47
103
67
Numeric character reference
G
EBCDIC family 199
C7
135

LATIN SMALL LETTER G

decimal
hex
U+0067
G g g
87