# Forum Other Languages Slavic languages Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian  Pronouniation of "j"

## MasterAdmin

Whenever Serbian/Bosnian/Croatian words are written in Latin, is "j" always pronounced as "zh" or it can be "y" (as in "yes") as well? I am interested in words like: 
nedelja/nedjelja/nedzhelja
devojka/djevojka/dzhevojka
gdje
uvijek
rijeka
lijep
ovdje

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## Mayita

It's always, *always* pronounced "y" as in "yes"  ::

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By itself is it pronounced like the Y in yes, it never makes anything even close to a z sound. But when preceded by a L, it makes a sound which doesn't exist in the English language. I am unsure if it exists in the Russian language. In Serbian Cyrillic, you would not write lj, you would write љ for example недеља but in Croatian/Bosnian they use latin so they have to write lj. 
By the way I have never heard the words nedzhelja or dzhevojka with the z in them, so either you mispelled them or they are from some obscure village dialect that 99% of people wouldn't understand.   ::

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> By the way I have never heard the words nedzhelja or dzhevojka with the z in them, so either you mispelled them or they are from some obscure village dialect that 99% of people wouldn't understand.

 ouch.

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## Stjepan

Maybe the result of the confusion is that some people write đ as dj when using English latin letters.  Those words do not have a dž (same as Russian дж) or đ (similar to dž but softer) in them. 
J is the same as the german j or English y.  The letters lj and nj is just a soft l and soft n sound respectively such as ль and нь in Russian. 
Hope this helps.

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http://pub18.ezboard.com/fbalkanscrnago ... =352.topic

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