The pronunciation of GIF, an acronym for the Graphics Interchange Format, has been disputed since the 1990s. Popularly rendered in English as a one-syllable word, the acronym is most commonly pronounced GHIF (with a hard g as in gig) or JIF (with a soft g as in gin), differing in the phoneme represented by the letter G. Many public figures and institutions have taken sides in the debate; Steve Wilhite, the computer scientist who created the Graphics Interchange Format, gave a speech at the 2013 Webby Awards arguing for the soft-g pronunciation. Others have pointed to the term's origin from abbreviation of the hard-g word graphics to argue for the other pronunciation. Some speakers pronounce GIF as an initialism rather than an acronym, producing . The controversy stems partly from the fact that the pronunciation of an initial g is not standardized; the hard g prevails in words such as gift, while the soft g is used in others such as ginger. Linguistic analyses show no clear advantage for either phoneme based on the pronunciation frequencies of similar English words, and English dictionaries generally accept both main alternatives as valid. The pronunciation of the acronym can also vary in other languages.
Background The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) is an image file format developed in 1987 by Steve Wilhite at the American online service provider CompuServe. GIFs are popularly used to display short, looped animations. The acronym GIF, commonly pronounced as a monosyllable, has a disputed pronunciation. Some individuals pronounce the word with a hard g, as in , whereas others pronounce it with a soft g, as in . A minority prefer to pronounce it as an initialism, speaking the name of each letter, creating the pronunciation . Wilhite and the team who developed the file format included in the technical specifications that the acronym was to be pronounced with a soft g. In the specifications, the team wrote that "choosy programmers choose ... 'jif'", in homage to the peanut butter company Jif's advertising slogan of "choosy moms choose Jif". According to ABC News, the debate stretches as far back as 1994, with an author of an encyclopedia of image formats stating that "most people" seem to prefer the hard g pronunciation over his preferred soft g.
Other languages In French, the acronym tends to be pronounced [ʒif] , with the voiced postalveolar fricative, [ʒ], as in the j in the French joie or the s in the English measure or vision, even though [dʒ], which does not occur in native vocabulary, tends to be retained in English loanwords (such as jeans). In Norwegian, GIF is pronounced with a hard g, [ɡ], unlike native words, for which the sequence ⟨gi⟩ would be pronounced with a voiced palatal approximant, [j], like the y in English yes. In German, there is no soft g, so the pronunciation is [ɡɪf] .
Analysis
Cause In English, the linguistic controversy stems partly from the fact that there is no standard for how the letter sequence gi is to be pronounced; the hard g prevails in words such as gift, while the soft g is used in others, such as ginger, giraffe and gist. In Old English, g could represent: 1) the voiced palatal approximant /j/ (as in Modern English ⟨yes⟩), which had the allophone [d͡ʒ]—the voiced postalveolar affricate (as in Modern English ⟨jab⟩), and 2) the voiced velar fricative /ɣ/ (not present in Modern English), which had the allophone [ɡ]—the voiced velar plosive (as in Modern English ⟨gap⟩). Most [j]-retaining words of Old English origin are spelt now with ⟨y⟩ (such as ⟨yes⟩ and ⟨yet⟩). Modern grammars of Old English distinguish between: 1) the palatal value [j] and the postalveolar value [d͡ʒ] by writing ⟨ġ⟩ and 2) the velar values [ɣ] and [ɡ] by writing ⟨g⟩. An analysis of 269 words by linguist Michael Dow found near-tied results on whether a hard or soft g was more appropriate based on other English words; the results varied somewhat depending on what parameters were used. Of the 105 words that contained gi somewhere in the word, 68 used the soft g while only 37 employed its counterpart. However, the hard g words were found to be significantly more common in everyday English; comparatively obscure words like flibbertigibbet and tergiversate, both pronounced with a soft g, were included in the list of 68 soft gi words. When the prevalence of each word was taken into account, it was found that the hard and soft g appeared in nearly equal frequencies in gi words. No clear favorite was found by only using the words that begin with gi, nor by only using words with one syllable such as gift and gin. In her coverage of Dow's piece, Canadian linguist Gretchen McCulloch theorizes that since the hard and soft g in this context are used with near-equal frequency, when a person first encounters the word GIF, they make a guess akin to flipping a coin by comparing it to other words they have encountered in the past. Once they have a favorite one way or the other, the notion is solidified—leading McCulloch to comment that this "probably means we'll be fighting the gif pronunciation war for generations to come".
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