U+01C6 "dž" Latin Small Letter Dz with Caron Unicode Character

U+01C6 "dž" Latin Small Letter Dz with Caron is a single grapheme used primarily in the Gaj's Latin alphabet for the Serbo-Croatian language, where it represents the voiced alveolar affricate sound /dʒ/, similar to the "j" in the English word "judge." This letter is a ligature of the letters D and Z with a caron diacritic placed above it, and it is the lowercase form used alongside its uppercase counterpart "Dž" and the titlecase variant "DŽ." In standard orthography, it functions as a distinct alphabetic unit, appearing in dictionaries and text to denote a specific phoneme that cannot be simply represented by the individual letters D and Z together without the caron.