Sh (digraph)



Sh is a digraph of the Latin alphabet, a combination of S and H.

Albanian
In Albanian, sh represents. It is considered a distinct letter, named shë, and placed between S and T in the Albanian alphabet.

Breton
In Breton, sh represents. It is not considered a distinct letter and it is a variety of zh (e. g. koshoc'h ("older"). It is not considered as a digraph in compound words, such as kroashent ("roundabout": kroaz ("cross") + hent ("way", "ford").

English
In English, usually represents. The exception is in compound words, where the and  are not a digraph, but pronounced separately, e.g. hogshead is hogs-head, not *hog-shead. 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). In isolation it stands for the word "shall".

In Old English orthography, the sound was written. In Middle English it came to be written Sch (trigraph) or ; the latter spelling has been adopted as the usual one in Modern English.

Irish
In Irish, represents  and marks the lenition of $⟨s⟩$; for example mo shaol  "my life" (cf. saol  "life").

Ladino
In Judaeo-Spanish, sh represents and occurs in both native words (debasho, ‘under’) and foreign ones (shalom, ‘hello’). In the Hebrew script it is written ש.

Occitan
In Occitan, sh represents. 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". An i before sh is silent: peish, naishença are pronounced. 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.

Spanish
In Spanish, sh represents almost only in foreign origin words, as flash, show, shuara or geisha. Royal Spanish Academy recommends adapting in both spelling and pronunciation with s, adapting to common pronunciation in peninsular dialect. Nevertheless, in American dialects it is frequently pronounced [ t͡ʃ].

Somali
Sh represents the sound in the Somali Latin Alphabet. It is considered a separate letter, and is the 9th letter of the alphabet.

Uyghur
Sh represents the sound 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. It is the 27th letter of the Uzbek alphabet.

Finnish and Estonian
In Finnish and Estonian, sh is used in place of Š|š to represent [ ʃ] when the accented character is unavailable.

Romanization
In the Pinyin, Wade-Giles, and Yale romanizations of Chinese, sh represents retroflex. It contrasts with, which is written x in Pinyin, hs in Wade-Giles, and sy in Yale.

In the Hepburn romanization of Japanese, sh represents. Other romanizations write as s before i and sy before other vowels.

Ido
In Ido, sh represents.