Ghayn

The Arabic letter ' (غَيْنْ, ' or ) is the nineteenth letter of the Arabic alphabet, one of the six letters not in the twenty-two akin to the Phoenician alphabet (the others being, , , , ). It represents the sound or. In name and shape, it is a variant of ʻayn. Its numerical value is 1000 (see Abjad numerals). In the Persian language, it represents ~ and is the twenty-second letter in the new Persian alphabet.

 is written in several ways depending on its position in the word:

History
Proto-Semitic (usually reconstructed as voiced velar fricative  or voiced uvular fricative ) merged with ʻayn in most Semitic languages except for Arabic, Ugaritic, and older varieties of the Canaanite languages. The South Arabian alphabet retained a symbol for,. Biblical Hebrew, as of the 3rd century BCE, apparently still distinguished the phonemes and , based on transcriptions in the Septuagint, such as that of the name "Gomorrah" as Gomorras (Γομορραν) for the Hebrew ‘Ămōrā (עֲמֹרָה). Canaanite languages, including Hebrew, later also merged with ʻayin, and the merger was complete in Tiberian Hebrew.

Usage
The letter (غ) is preferred in the Levant (nowadays), and by Aljazeera TV channel, to represent, e.g., هونغ كونغ (Hong Kong), البرتغال (Portugal), and غاندالف (Gandalf). Foreign publications and TV channels in Arabic, e.g. Deutsche Welle, and Alhurra, follow this practice. It is then often pronounced, not , though in many cases, غ is pronounced in loanwords as expected (, not ).

Other letters can be used to transcribe in loanwords and names, depending on whether the local variety of Arabic in the country has the phoneme, and if it does, which letter represents it, and whether it is customary in the country to use that letter to transcribe. For instance, in Egypt, where ج is pronounced as in all situations, even in speaking Modern Standard Arabic (except in certain contexts, such as reciting the Qur'an), ج is used to transcribe foreign  in all contexts. The same applies to coastal Yemen, as well as southwestern and eastern Oman. In Algerian Arabic, Hejazi Arabic and Najdi Arabic it is qāf. In Iraq, gaf is more used. In Morocco, gāf or kāf  is used. In Tunisia and Algeria, or qāf  is used.

When representing the sound in transliteration of Arabic into Hebrew, it is written as ע׳. In English, the letter غ in Arabic names is usually transliterated as, , or simply g: بغداد 'Baghdad', قرغيزستان  'Kyrgyzstan', or غزة  'Gaza', the latter of which does not render the sound ~ accurately. The closest equivalent sound to be known to most English-speakers is the Parisian French "r".

Related characters
For the related characters, see ng (Arabic letter)