Ka with descender (Қ қ; italics: ''Қ қ'') is a letter of the

Cyrillic script The Cyrillic script ( ), Slavonic script or the Slavic script, is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking c ...

used in a number of non-Slavic languages spoken in the territory of the former Soviet Union, including: * the

Turkic languages The Turkic languages are a language family of over 35 documented languages, spoken by the Turkic peoples of Eurasia from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe to Central Asia, East Asia, North Asia ( Siberia), and Western Asia. The Turki ...

Kazakh, Uighur, Uzbek and several smaller languages ( Karakalpak, Shor and Tofa), where it represents the

voiceless uvular plosive The voiceless uvular plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. It is pronounced like a voiceless velar plosive , except that the tongue makes contact not on the soft palate but on the uvula. The symbol in th ...

. *

Iranian languages The Iranian languages or Iranic languages are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family that are spoken natively by the Iranian peoples, predominantly in the Iranian Plateau. The Iranian languages are groupe ...

such as Tajik and

Ossetic Ossetian (, , ), commonly referred to as Ossetic and rarely as Ossete (), is an Eastern Iranian language that is spoken predominantly in Ossetia, a region situated on both sides of the Greater Caucasus. It is the native language of the Ossetia ...

(before 1924; now superseded by the digraph ). Since 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 Khanty (also spelled Khanti or Hanti), previously known as Ostyak (), is a Uralic language spoken by the Khanty people, primarily in the Khanty–Mansi and Yamalo-Nenets autonomous okrugs and the Aleksandrovsky and Kargosoksky districts of To ...

, where it also represents . * the

Abkhaz language Abkhaz ( ; ), sometimes spelled Abxaz and also known as Abkhazian, is a Northwest Caucasian language most closely related to Abaza. It is spoken mostly by the Abkhaz people. It is one of the official languages of Abkhazia, where around 100,00 ...

where it represents the

voiceless velar plosive The voiceless velar plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound used in almost all spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is k. The sound is a ver ...

. (The Cyrillic letter Ka (К к) is used to represent .) 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). Its

ISO 9 ISO 9 is an international standard establishing a system for the transliteration into Latin characters of Cyrillic characters constituting the alphabets of many Slavic and non-Slavic languages. Published on February 23, 1995 by the Internatio ...

transliteration is ( with

cedilla A cedilla ( ; from Spanish) or cedille (from French , ) is a hook or tail ( ¸ ) added under certain letters as a diacritical mark to modify their pronunciation. In Catalan language, Catalan, French language, French, and Portuguese language, ...

), and is so transliterated for Abkhaz, while the common Kazakh and Uzbek romanization is .

Computing codes

See also