Ka with descender
| Ka with descender | |
|---|---|
| Қ қ | |
 | |
| Usage | |
| Writing system | Cyrillic |
| Type | Alphabetic |
| Sound values | [q], [kʰ] |
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- Iranian languages such as Tajik and, before 1924, Ossetic (now superseded by the digraph ⟨Къ⟩).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/.[1] (The Cyrillic letter Ka (К к) is used to represent the ejective /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).
Its ISO 9 transliteration is ⟨ķ⟩ (k with cedilla),[2] and this is the standard transliteration for Abkhaz Қ. The common Kazakh and Uzbek Romanization is ⟨q⟩.
Computing codes
| Preview | Қ | қ | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unicode name | CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER KA WITH DESCENDER |
CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER KA WITH DESCENDER | ||
| Encodings | decimal | hex | dec | hex |
| Unicode | 1178 | U+049A | 1179 | U+049B |
| UTF-8 | 210 154 | D2 9A | 210 155 | D2 9B |
| Numeric character reference | Қ | Қ | қ | қ |
See also
Other Cyrillic letters used to write the sound /q/:
References
- ↑ Hewitt, George (2010). Abkhaz: A Comprehensive Self-Tutor. Lincom Europa. pp. 18–20.
- ↑ ISO 9:1995 Information and documentation - Transliteration of Cyrillic characters into Latin characters - Slavic and non-Slavic languages. International Standards Organization. p. 8.
- ↑ Unicode Consortium (2000). The Unicode Standard, Version 3.0. Addison-Wesley. p. 380. ISBN 978-0-201-61633-0. Retrieved 27 June 2025.
