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Ka with descender
Cyrillic letter used in various languages From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Ka with descender (Қ қ; italics: Қ қ), is a letter of the Cyrillic script used in a number of non-Slavic languages spoken in the territory of the former Soviet Union, including:
- the Turkic languages Kazakh, Uyghur, Uzbek and several smaller languages (Karakalpak, Shor and Tofa), where it represents the voiceless uvular plosive /q/.
- Iranian languages such as Tajik and, before 1924, Ossetic (now superseded by the digraph ⟨Къ⟩). Since /q/ is represented by the letter ق qāf in the Arabic alphabet, Қ is sometimes referred to as "Cyrillic Qaf".
- Eastern varieties of the Khanty language, where it also represents /q/.
- the Abkhaz language, where it represents the aspirated voiceless velar plosive /kʰ/. (The Cyrillic letter Ka (К к) is used to represent /kʼ/.) It was introduced in 1905 for the spelling of Abkhaz. From 1928 to 1938, Abkhaz was spelled with the Latin alphabet, and the corresponding letter was the Latin letter K with descender (Ⱪ ⱪ).
This article relies largely or entirely on a single source. (June 2025) |
Its ISO 9 transliteration is ⟨ķ⟩ (k with cedilla), and is so transliterated for Abkhaz, while the common Kazakh and Uzbek romanization is ⟨q⟩.
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Computing codes
See also
Other Cyrillic letters used to write the sound /q/:
References
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