Tajikistan appeared as "Tadjikistan" or "Tadzhikistan" in English prior to 1991. This is due to a transliteration from the . In Russian, there is no single letter j to represent the phoneme /ʤ/, and therefore дж, or dzh, is used. Tadzhikistan is the most common alternate spelling and is widely used in English literature derived from Russian sources. "Tadjikistan" is the spelling in French and can occasionally be found in English language texts. The way of writing Tajikistan in the Perso-Arabic script is: .