"Ij" is also one sounds represented bij two letters, and I think capitalizing just the 'I' is pretty standard. As a Dutch person myself, I didn't even know that there's a glyph for it!

We also have "ei", which sounds the same and was invented to annoy people learning Dutch. Then there's "oe", "eu", "ui". And just to fuck even more with people learning the language, we have "au" and "ou" which also sound the same. Oh, and "ch" and "g".

Hans Brinker, the inventor of the Dutch language, famously would toss a florijn to decide between using ei/ij and au/ou, as he was not fond of foreigners. He's mostly known for saving our country though when he plugged a hole in a dyke with his finger (yes, I know what you're thinking, and no, we do not appreciate your dirty minds making light of this heroic act).

Spelling it "dike" helps keep people's minds on the right thing. :)

If you spell it "dijk" it's even less racy, because it's no longer a four-letter word.

Well shit. Guess I'll have to clean out my mind with some soap...

As a Dutch person myself, capitalizing just the I and not the J hurts my eyes. Ijsselmeer or IJsselmeer?

Interesting. I never really gave it much thought, but Ij actually bothers me so much that I usually try to avoid using it at the beginning of a sentence, and I cringe when I need to capitalize because it's a place (like Ijsselmeer).

Just did some googling. Turns out that unlike the other combinations, capitalizing both letters is mandatory for 'IJ'. TIL...

Same as OE/Πin French, then.

Nobody has that as a letter on the keyboard here though, so it doesn't matter. Normally typed as a digraph. Would be nice if we just switched over to using y at this point. Makes me wonder, is the use of diacritics reducing since ascii keyboards became the norm ?

Afrikaans did this. We use "y" instead of "ij".

"ij" is sometimes considered a single letter, but certainly not always. Quoting Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraph)):

"IJ (lowercase ij; Dutch pronunciation: [ɛi]) is a digraph of the letters i and j. Occurring in the Dutch language, it is sometimes considered a ligature, or a letter in itself. In most fonts that have a separate character for ij, the two composing parts are not connected but are separate glyphs, which are sometimes slightly kerned."

(and equivalent in the Dutch Wikipedia article)

I don't know that that's correct. That there exists a ligature character doesn't mean the ligature is a character of the language.

It could, mind, I don't know dutch. But in french "œ" (which has a ligatured character as you can see) is canonically equivalent to "oe". It is not a separate letter of the alphabet even though:

* many words should not be written with the ligatured form

* many words should be written with the ligatured form

* it has a different pronunciation than the base form