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 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• Iranian languages such as Tajik and, before 1924, Ossetic (now superseded by the digraph ⟨Къ⟩).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/. (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⟩.