Lje

Lje
Lje
Љ љ
Usage
Writing system	Cyrillic
Type	Alphabetic
Language of origin	Macedonian, Bosnian, Montenegrin, Serbian Itelmen
Sound values	[ʎ], [ɫ]
History
Development	ЛЬ ль Љ љ;
Transliterations	Ll ll
	This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

Lje, or Lle (Љ љ; italics: Љ љ; also called lye) is a letter of the Cyrillic script.

Lje represents a palatal lateral /ʎ/, a sound similar (but not identical) to the palatalized alveolar lateral approximant /lʲ/, which is in some languages represented by the digraph ⟨ль⟩ and pronounced /lʲ/ like the ⟨ll⟩ in "million". Compare Latvian ⟨ļ⟩, Slovak ⟨ľ⟩, Hungarian ⟨ly⟩, Portuguese ⟨lh⟩, Spanish ⟨ll⟩ and Italian ⟨gl⟩.

Lje is a ligature of ⟨л⟩ and ⟨ь⟩.^[1] It was invented by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić for use in his 1818 dictionary, replacing the earlier digraph ⟨ль⟩.^[1] It corresponds to the digraph ⟨ǈ⟩ in Gaj's Latin alphabet for Serbo-Croatian.^[1]

It is today used in Macedonian, variants of Serbo-Croatian when written in Cyrillic (Bosnian, Montenegrin and Serbian), and Itelmen.

It was also once used in the Udege language, in the Lithuanian Cyrillic alphabet, and in the Albanian Cyrillic alphabet.

Lje is commonly transliterated as lj but can also be transliterated as ľ, or ļ.

Related letters and other similar characters

Л л : Cyrillic letter El
Ь ь : Cyrillic letter Soft sign
Ll : Spanish double L in the absence of Yeísmo
Ľ ľ : Latin letter L with caron - a Slovak letter
Ĺ ĺ : Latin letter L with acute - another Slovak letter
Ļ ļ : Latin letter L with cedilla - a Latvian letter
Ly : Hungarian ly
Њ њ : Cyrillic letter Nje
Ǉ ǈ ǉ : Compatibility Unicode characters
Ԉ ԉ : Komi Lje - corresponding character formerly used in Komi

Computing codes

Character information
Preview	Љ		љ
Unicode name	CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER LJE		CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER LJE
Encodings	decimal	hex	dec	hex
Unicode	1033	U+0409	1113	U+0459
UTF-8	208 137	D0 89	209 153	D1 99
Numeric character reference	Љ	Љ	љ	љ
Named character reference	&LJcy;		&ljcy;
Code page 855	145	91	144	90
Windows-1251	138	8A	154	9A
ISO-8859-5	169	A9	249	F9
Macintosh Cyrillic	188	BC	189	BD