Ka with descender

{{Short description|Cyrillic letter used in various languages}}

{{Unreferenced|date=December 2009}}

{{Infobox grapheme

|script = Cyrillic

|type = Alphabet

|typedesc = ic

|name = Ka with descender

|image = Cyrillic letter Qaf.svg

|imagesize = 120px

|imagealt =

|phonemes = {{IPA|[q]}}, {{IPA|[kʰ]}}

|number =

|fam1 =

}}

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• Iranian languages such as Tajik and, before 1924, Ossetic (now superseded by the digraph {{angbr|Къ}}).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