IJ (digraph)
An ij in written Dutch usually represents the diphthong [ɛi], similar to the pronunciation of ⟨ay⟩ in "pay".
Whether it is pronounced identically to ei or not, the pronunciation of ij is often perceived as being difficult by people who do not have either sound in their native language.
[3] It used to be written as ii, as in Finnish and Estonian, but for orthographic purposes, the second i was eventually elongated, which is a reason why it is called lange ij.
The letter "y" is not part of the Dutch alphabet, but commonly used in loan words and archaic names.
The spelling of Afrikaans (a daughter language of early modern Dutch) has evolved in the exact opposite direction and IJ has been completely replaced by Y.
IJ probably developed out of ii, representing a long [iː] sound (which it still does in some cases, such as in the word bijzonder and in several Dutch dialects).
In other European languages it was first used for the final i in Roman numerals when there was more than one i in a row, such as iij for "three", to prevent the fraudulent addition of an extra i to change the number.
In Dutch, which had a native ii, the "final i in a row elongated" rule was applied as well, leading to ij.
An argument against this theory is that even in handwriting which does not join letters, ij is often written as a single sign.
Some time after the birth of this new letter, the sound which was now represented by ij, in most cases, began to be pronounced much like ei instead, but words containing it were still spelled the same.
Nowadays, ij in most cases represents the diphthong [ɛi], except in the suffix -lijk, where it is usually pronounced as a schwa.
In one special case, the Dutch word bijzonder, the (old) sound [iː] is correct standard pronunciation, although [i] is more common and [ɛi] is also allowed.
In proper names, ij often appears instead of i at the end of other diphthongs, where it does not affect the pronunciation: aaij, eij, oeij, ooij and uij are pronounced identically to aai [aːi], ei [ɛi], oei [ui], ooi [oːi] and ui [œy].
Both the Dutch Language Union and the Genootschap Onze Taal consider the ij to be a digraph of the letters i and j.
"[7] The Winkler Prins encyclopedia states that ij is the 25th letter of the Dutch alphabet, placed between X and Y.
Poorly localised text editors with autocorrect functionality may incorrectly convert the second of two initial capital letters in a word to lowercase; such improper spelling can thus be found in informal writing.
Support on the internet is similarly inconsistent: Web pages styled with the CSS property text-transform: capitalize are specified to be handled with Unicode language-specific case mapping rules (content language being indicated with HTML language attributes, such as lang="nl" for Dutch), but support for language-specific cases is limited to Mozilla Firefox (version 14 and above) as of January 2021[update].
[4] On the other hand, some encyclopedias, like the Winkler Prins, 7th edition, sort ij as a single letter positioned between x and y.
[12] Nevertheless, in Unicode it is possible to combine characters into a j with an acute accent — "bíj́na" — though this might not be supported or rendered correctly by some fonts or systems.
This is clearly different from the codeword Ypsilon, which is used to represent the Y. Dutch and Belgian armed forces use the official NATO phonetic alphabet, where "Y" is "Yankee" and "IJ" is spelled out "India Juliett".
On some road signs in the Netherlands, IJ appears as a single glyph formed like a U with a break in the left-hand stroke.
The standard US layout (often in "International Mode") is widely used, although a specific but rarely used Dutch variant (KBD143) does exist.
