Q - Use in Other Languages

Use in Other Languages

In most European languages written in the Latin script, such as in Romance and Germanic languages, ⟨q⟩ appears almost exclusively in the digraph ⟨qu⟩. Notable exceptions to this are Albanian, in which ⟨q⟩ represents the voiceless palatal stop ; and Maltese and Võro, which use ⟨q⟩ to represent the glottal stop . In French, Occitan, Catalan and Portuguese, ⟨qu⟩ represents /k/ or /kw/; in Spanish, it represents /k/. ⟨qu⟩ replaces ⟨c⟩ for /k/ before front vowels ⟨i⟩ and ⟨e⟩, since in those languages 'c' represents a fricative or affricate before front vowels. In Italian ⟨qu⟩ represents /kw/ (where /w/ is the semivowel allophone of /u/).

Q has a wide variety of pronunciations among non-European languages that have adopted the Latin alphabet. The International Phonetic Alphabet uses Q for the voiceless uvular stop, and it has this value in Aymara, Greenlandic, Quechua and Uyghur. In Azerbaijani, ⟨q⟩ stands for a voiced velar stop . In Chinese Hanyu Pinyin, ⟨q⟩ is used to represent the sound, which is close to English ⟨ch⟩ in "cheese", but pronounced further toward the front of the mouth. ⟨q⟩ in Fijian has the value of a prenasalized voiced velar stop . In Kiowa, ⟨q⟩ represents a glottalized velar stop . In Xhosa and Zulu, ⟨q⟩ is used for the postalveolar click .

The lowercase Q is usually seen as a lowercase O with a descender (i.e., downward vertical tail) extending from the right side of the bowl, with or without a swash (i.e., flourish), even a reversed lowercase p. The lowercase Q's descender is usually typed without a swash due to the major style difference typically seen between the descenders of the lowercase G (a loop) and lowercase Q (vertical). The descender of the lowercase Q is sometimes handwritten finishing with a rightward swash to distinguish from the leftward facing curved descender on the lowercase G.