Ka with descender explained

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 pronounced as //q//.
Iranian languages such as Tajik and, before 1924, Ossetic (now superseded by the digraph (Къ)). Since pronounced as //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 pronounced as //q//.
the Abkhaz language, where it represents the aspirated voiceless velar plosive pronounced as //kʰ//. (The Cyrillic letter Ka (К к) is used to represent pronounced as //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 (k with cedilla), and is so transliterated for Abkhaz, while the common Kazakh and Uzbek romanization is (q).

See also