Hard G and soft G are both acceptable pronunciations, the only way to be wrong in the situation is to insist that your preferred way to pronounce it is the only correct way to pronounce it
In English the correct way to pronounce something is the way that will most reliably communicate to your intended audience without ambiguity or distraction.
Since my intention is usually to convey my superior knowledge of trivia and/or to stir shit up, I pronounce it with a soft g.
You have people saying that language is fluid, and that one person cannot decide which pronunciation is correct.
Then, in that same comment, they say that their preferred pronunciation is obviously correct.
Hard g, soft g, you do you. It really doesn't change much.
When I rise to power anyone who disagrees will be immediately found guilty of thought crimes and sentenced to castration, followed by execution, in that order.
does it really matter? as long as you passed third grade reading comprehension you can use context from the conversation to understand that the person is talking about a moving image instead of a peanut butter brand.
This always attracts pedants whining "the creator said to pronounce it like jif!" and it's like, OK,
A) That's an appeal to authority, one of the best known logical fallacies
B) The creator of Mother's Day spent over 30 years trying to get people to stop celebrating it, but too bad, I'm still gonna wish my Mom a happy Mother's Day, you know?
Just pronounce it the way you pronounce it. I say gif, because in the uk we have a well known brand of lemon juice called jif so it makes sense to not pronounce gif un the same way. Maybe in other countries they dont have jif.
Tbh, I used to pronounce it 'JIF' (because in my native language, 'gi' is always a soft 'g', and I usually speak that), but now that I think about it in English, a hard G makes more sense.
In Romanian I also pronounce gigabytes as jigabytes :)
I’m going to avoid all controversy and just make the g silent. It’s ‘if from now on.
If I say it fast enough, people will just assume I use their version.
I'm not aware of any word that changes pronunciation of the first letter by adding a letter at the end. The closest thing we have to GIF is "gift", being "gif" with an extra "t" at the end. By that logic GIF should be pronounced like "gift" without the "t".