Že or Zhe (ژ) used to represent the phoneme /ʒ/, is a letter in the Persian alphabet, based on zayn (ز) with two additional diacritic dots. It is one of the five letters that the Persian alphabet adds to the original Arabic script, others being چ ,پ and گ, in addition the obsolete ڤ.[1]
It is found with this value in other Arabic-derived scripts. It is used in Pashto, Kurdish, other Iranian languages, Uyghur, Ottoman Turkish (j in the modern Turkish alphabet), Azerbaijani and Urdu, but not in Arabic.
In Kashmiri, this letter is called "tse" and represents the phoneme [t͡s].
In most of the Levant and Northwestern Africa, the letter ج ǧīm is used for /ʒ/.
| Position in word | Isolated | Final | Medial | Initial |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Glyph form: (Help) | ژ | ـژ | ـژ | ژ |
Character encodings
| Preview | ژ | |
|---|---|---|
| Unicode name | PERSIAN LETTER JEH | |
| Encodings | decimal | hex |
| Unicode | 1688 | U+0698 |
| UTF-8 | 218 152 | DA 98 |
| Numeric character reference | ژ | ژ |
In other scripts
Devanagari
In Devanagari the letters झ़ and श़ (with a nuqta) are used to represent the sound of /ʒ/, e.g. टेलीविझ़न / टेलीविश़न ṭēlivižan 'television'. The letter corresponds to the Urdu Perso-Arabic ژ.
Bengali
In Bengali the sound of /ʒ/ may be represented as জ়়, i.e. the letter Ja with two dots.
Cyrillic
The letter ж, common in some Slavic languages, has an equivalent sound to the "s" in "television" e.g. Zharkov (Russian Cyrillic: Жарков).