J is the tenth letter in the modern Latin alphabet; it was the last of the 26 letters to be added. Its name in English is jay ()."J", Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989) It was formerly jy (from French ji), and in some dialects, mainly of Scottish English, it still is ().

History

J was originally an alternative version of I. Its minuscule, j, was used in the Middle Ages as a swash character to end some Roman numerals in place of i. There was an emerging distinctive use in Middle High German. Gian Giorgio Trissino (1478-1550) was the first to explicitly distinguish I and J as representing separate sounds, in his Ɛpistola del Trissino de le lettere nuωvamente aggiunte ne la lingua italiana ("Trissino's epistle about the letters recently added in the Italian language") of 1524. Originally, both I and J represented , , and ; but Romance languages developed new sounds (from former and ) that came to be represented as I and J; therefore, English J (from French J) has a sound value quite different from .

All the Germanic languages except English, Scots and Luxembourgish use J for . This is also true of Albanian, and those Uralic and Slavic languages that use the Latin alphabet, such as Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Polish, Czech, and Slovak. Some languages in these families, such as Serbian, also adopted J into the Cyrillic alphabet for the same purpose. Because of this standard, the minuscule letter was chosen to be used in the IPA as the phonetic symbol for the sound.

Linguists from Germany and Central Europe also took up this letter in transliterations from those Slavic languages which use the Cyrillic alphabet. Specifically, the "Е" in Russian is sometimes transliterated "je" (with the "Ё" becoming "jo"); the "Я" is transliterated as "ja"; and the character "Ю" is transliterated "ju" - whereas the linguists from America and the English speaking world use "y" in place of "j" because of English, French, and Spanish use of Y for . European linguists also use "j" for the character Й so that e.g. "-ий", a common adjective ending, is transliterated as "-ij". In English transliterations, that ending may be rendered as "-iy" or "-ii". Language students have to learn to find their way among the different possibilities indicated, either by the "j" or by the "y".

In modern standard Italian spelling, only Latin words or those of foreign languages have J. Until the 19th century, J was used instead of I in diphthongs, as a replacement for final -ii, and in vowel groups (as in Savoja); this rule was quite strict for official writing. And J is also used for rendering words in dialect, where it stands for , e.g. Romanesque ajo for standard aglio (garlic). The Italian Novelist Luigi Pirandello utilised J in vowel groups in his works.

In Spanish J stands for (which developed from an earlier affricate ), similar to the English "H" sound. However, the actual phonetic realization depends on dialect. When followed by an 'A' or an 'O' however, it assumes a guttural sound (fricative uvular /χ/), probably a remainder of Arabic or Hebrew influences.

In French, Catalan, Portuguese, and Romanian, former is now pronounced as (as in English measure).

In Turkish, Azerbaijani and Tatar, J always represents .
Hebrew also influenced the English J, which in a few cases is used in place of the more normal Y. The classic example is Hallelujah which is pronounced the same as "Halleluyah". See the Hebrew yud for more details.

Some German typefaces of the fraktur or schwabacher types, obsolete since the end of the Second World War, do not necessarily distinguish between the capital I and J. The same character, a 'J' with a top serif of the tilde form, was sometimes used for both. The minuscule i and j, however, were distinguished.

In Thomas Hardy's novel Tess Of The D'Urbervilles, Tess's mother writes letters to Angel Clare using "J" as the first person singular pronoun. Although the novel is set in the 19th century, this practice apparently remained in some rural areas.

In Denmark, Germany, Norway, Sweden and Albania, this letter is often written with a long serif on top, but only to the left of the character.

J is used relatively infrequently in the English Language, though it is more commonly used than Q, X or Z. It is also not used frequently in the Native American languages; Gwich'in, Hän, Kaska, Tagish, Tlingit, Navajo, Northern and Southern Tutchone.

In Kiowa, J stands for a voiceless alveolar plosive, .

The dot above the lowercase "i" and "j" is known as a tittle.

"J" is the only letter that does not appear in the Periodic Table of the Elements (although Jl was once symbol for joliotium, and J alone has been used for iodine). "Q" is only used in temporary systematic chemical symbols.

Codes for computing

In Unicode the capital J is codepoint U+004A and the lowercase j is U+006A. Unicode also has a dotless variant, (U+0237) for use with combining diacritics.

The ASCII code for capital J is 74 and for lowercase j is 106; or in binary 01001010 and 01101010, respectively.

The EBCDIC code for capital J is 209 and for lowercase j is 145.

The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "J" and "j" for upper and lower case respectively.