All borrowed words are nativized to some extent, but because that’s how language works, not because English is a Germanic language.
Of course, gif is a coined word, which is different.
What I’m saying is that when an English-speaker reads an unfamiliar word, s/he defaults to the English pronunciation rather than French. If an English-speaker reads ‘gif’, the default would be to pronounce it as an actual word, with a hard g.
Suppose you didn’t know how the word ‘paradigm’ is pronounced. Would you read it as ‘para-dime’? Or would you rely on your English and pronounce it ‘para-dij-um’ or ‘para-digg-um’?
Okay, you’re using “Germanic” to mean “English as opposed to French”. That’s what was confusing me. I don’ t think we disagree about anything except terminology.
I said that reading that particular string of letters as a word, an English-speaker would pronounce it with a hard g. hogarth said that English borrowed heavily from French, so it’s not necessarily true that one would assume a hard g. I pointed out that English is a Germanic language, so an English speaker would default to the Germanic hard g instead of the French soft g.
Ditto. Exactly what I was going to say
I pronounce it the way that guy in the video pronounces it. Always have, never thought there was controversy over it until now
Weirdo. Everyone knows that .BMP is pronounced “bimp.”
Oh, and definitely a hard G. As is only right and proper, as all thinking people know.
I’m an English-speaker, and I’ve always pronounced it “jif” like the peanut butter.
I remember the “Choosy [people] choose .GIF!” joke mentioned by Prof. Pepperwinkle going around in the early to mid '90s. I probably heard “Choosy perverts choose .GIF!” (animated porn .GIFs) more often than any other form of the joke, but my friends were nerdy teens and not web designers.
Bolding mine.
GIF can be a verb? Like, when you create a GIF, you GIF something? So, one might say, “That’s a sweet video. I can’t wait to GIF it.”?
I would say, “…create a GIF.” but perhaps I’m old-fashioned or something.
QFT
How do you pronounce that? 
In my earlier years I called it with a soft G; in my later years I called it with a hard G; and now that I have written code to read and write GIF files, I now call it what it is: a motherfucker.
Graphic file formats are all major PITAs.
I too have never heard GIF used as a verb before. That’s the most interesting thing I’ve ever got out of this thread!
When I do have occaision to say the word out loud, I almost always say it with a hard g first, but then say “or jif, if you prefer” 
What can I say, I’m a people pleaser.
I suspect it’s more a case of which set of g words comes to the speaker’s mind first.
Because there are no common English words in which the g followed by i is hard? The words girl, give, and gift are imaginary?
The most recent episode of BBC Radio 4’s Friday Night Comedy podcast just came out, and Mitch Benn commented on the controversy, coming down on the not-Jif side, and proposed a list of things we’ve by extension been pronouncing all along, including saying that JPEG perhaps should be “gay-pej.”
The correct way. With a hard g.
QFT: quooft. Oo as in book.
Since JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group and acronyms are required by nerdlaw to use the starting sounds of the words they’re made of, it’s clearly pronounced juhff-egg.
I pronounce it like I pronounce “geoduck”: correctly. The hard-G sound is good, it makes it sound like that stuff they smoke in Morocco.