Latin Small Letter Dezh Digraph

Latin Small Letter Dezh Digraph at U+02A4 represents the voiced postalveolar affricate sound commonly heard at the start of English “judge.” It is a printable letter in the IPA Extensions block, originally encoded for phonetic transcription as a single digraph-style symbol joining d and ezh. In phonetics, it is used in older or compatibility-oriented IPA transcription for the sound now more often written with a two-letter sequence, as in transcribing English judge, gem, or ridge. It also appears in dictionaries, pronunciation guides, and linguistic databases that preserve earlier IPA typography or need round-trip compatibility with legacy phonetic text. The same sound is important in many languages, including English, Turkish, Albanian, and parts of Slavic and Indo-Aryan language description, where the symbol may label a phoneme in academic discussion even when the language’s normal spelling uses letters such as j, c, or dž. Modern fonts and input methods more often favor separate phonetic letters over this precomposed digraph, so searching old material may require checking both forms.