Lje


Lje, or Lle is a letter of the Cyrillic script.
Lje represents a palatal lateral, a sound similar to the palatalized alveolar lateral approximant /lʲ/, which is in some languages represented by the digraph ⟨ль⟩ and pronounced like the in "million". Compare Latvian ⟨ļ⟩, Slovak ⟨ľ⟩, Hungarian ⟨ly⟩, Portuguese ⟨lh⟩, Spanish ⟨ll⟩ and Italian ⟨gl⟩.
Lje is a ligature of ⟨л⟩ and ⟨ь⟩. It was invented by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić for use in his 1818 dictionary, replacing the earlier digraph ⟨ль⟩. It corresponds to the digraph in Gaj's Latin alphabet for Serbo-Croatian.
It is today used in Macedonian, variants of Serbo-Croatian when written in Cyrillic, 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