However, in Turkish, the phoneme has in most cases been reduced to a silent letter, serving as a vowel-lengthener.

(In loanwords they may sometimes be separated by a glottal stop, e.g. cemaat or cemaât, which may be pronounced as either [dʒeˈma.atʲ] or [dʒeˈmaʔatʲ].)

The realization of the phoneme depends on its location in a word and the surrounding vowels:[1] Some webpages may use ⟨Ð⟩ (uppercase) and ⟨ð⟩ (lowercase) for ⟨Ğ⟩ because of improper encoding; see Turkish characters for the reasons of this.

The letter, and its counterpart in the Ottoman Turkish alphabet, ⟨غ⟩, were once pronounced as a consonant, /ɣ/, the voiced velar fricative, until very recently in the history of Turkish, but it has undergone a sound change by which the consonant was completely lost and compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel occurred, hence its function today.

The expected process of lenition (weakening and eventual loss of the intervocalic Proto-Turkic consonant *ɡ) is thus complete in Turkish and underway in many other Common Turkic languages.