għ

Etymology
Continues Arabic and. The two phonemes were merged into around  since at least the 18th century, but continued to be distinguished as  and  elsewhere (in some rural dialects until the later 20th century). Both in merging and non-merging dialects, was weakly articulated and eventually vowelised, though word-finally after stressed vowels it underwent devoicing to  instead.

The symbol  was apparently first used in 1859 by the newspaper Il Habib tal Maltin (as an adaptation of earlier ), though it was not popularised until the first half of the 20th century.

Usage notes

 * In contemporary Maltese, għ remains a true consonant in word-final position  and in the cluster -għh-, which becomes . Otherwise it is silent or leaves at most a vocalic trace:
 * Following and preceding a, e, o are lengthened if stressed:,.
 * Following i, u become diphthongs:,  . A partial exception to this is the sequence , which has a number of possible realisations (cf. ).
 * In intervocalic position it is a glide, after i, ie, and  after u: ,.
 * The (always stressed) sequence -iegħ- becomes when followed by a consonant:.
 * After unstressed a, word-final is most often lost and then represented by an apostrophe:  . It resurfaces when an ending is added to the word:  . Exceptions are the verb ending negative suffix, before which silent  is simply dropped in the spelling: , and when adding suffixes , ,  where it changes to a more phonetically accurate :.
 * Phonotactically, word-initial now generally behaves like a vowel, allowing contractions such as  . However, word-internal  still behaves like a (virtual) consonant. Compare the aforementioned, where the vowel i has been added before the m, as though the latter were followed by a consonant.