Ka with descender

Ka with descender (Қ қ; italics: Қ қ) is a letter of the Cyrillic script used in a number of non-Slavic languages spoken on the territory of the former Soviet Union, including:

• the Turkic languages Kazakh, Uighur, Uzbek and several smaller languages (Karakalpak, Shor and Tofa), where it represents the voiceless uvular plosive /q/.
• Iranian languages such as Tajik and Ossetic (before 1924; now superseded by the digraph ⟨Къ⟩).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 voiceless velar plosive /k/. (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).

Its ISO 9 transliteration is ⟨ķ⟩ (⟨k⟩ with cedilla), and is so transliterated for Abkhaz, while the common Kazakh and Uzbek romanization is ⟨q⟩.

Computing codes

Character	Қ		қ
Unicode name	CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER KA WITH DESCENDER		CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER KA WITH DESCENDER
Encodings	decimal	hex	decimal	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/:

• Ӄ ӄ : Cyrillic letter Ka with hook
• Ҡ ҡ : Cyrillic letter Bashkir Qa
• Ԛ ԛ : Cyrillic letter Qa
• Ԟ ԟ : Cyrillic letter Aleut Ka

• Cyrillic characters in Unicode

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