Že or Zhe (Persian: ژ|size=2em|rtl=yes), used to represent the phoneme pronounced as /link/, is a letter in the Persian alphabet, based on (Arabic: ز) with two additional diacritic dots. It is one of the five letters that the Persian alphabet adds to the original Arabic script, others being Persian: چ,Persian: پ and Persian: گ, in addition the obsolete Persian: ڤ.[1] In name and shape, it is a variant of ze. Its numerical value is 4000 (see Abjad numerals).
It is found with this value in other Arabic-derived scripts. It is used in Pashto, Kurdish, other Iranian languages, Uyghur, Ottoman Turkish (j in the modern Turkish alphabet), Azerbaijani and Urdu, but not in Arabic.
In Kashmiri, this letter is called "tse" and represents the phoneme [t͡s].
In most of the Levant and Northwestern Africa, the letter Arabic: ج is used for pronounced as /link/. In Moroccan Arabic, the letter ژ is sometimes used to represent emphatic Z, such as in the word بژ meaning "children", as opposed to the normal ز, in order to differentiate between words that would look similar (for example بز meaning "forcing, to force").[2]
When representing this sound in transliteration of Persian into Hebrew, it is written as ז׳.
In Devanagari the letters and (with a nuqta) are used to represent the sound of /ʒ/, e.g. Hindi: टेलीविझ़न / Hindi: टेलीविश़न Hindi: ṭēlivižan 'television'. The letter corresponds to the Urdu Perso-Arabic Urdu: ژ.
In Bengali the sound of /ʒ/ may be represented as জ়়, i.e. the letter Ja with two dots.
The letter ж, common in some Slavic languages, has an equivalent sound to the "s" in "television" e.g. Zharkov (Russian Cyrillic: Жарков).