In most modern western languages written in Latin script, such as in Romance and Germanic languages, Q appears almost exclusively in the digraph QU, though see Q without U. In English this digraph most often denotes the cluster /kw/, except in borrowings from French where it represents /k/ as in plaque. In Italian qu represents [kw] (where [w] is an allophone of /u/); in German, /kv/; and in French, Portuguese, Occitan, Spanish, and Catalan, /k/ or /kw/. (In Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Occitan and French, qu replaces c for /k/ before front vowels i and e, since in those contexts c is a fricative and letter 'k' is seldom used outside loan words.) In Albanian, q represents the voiceless palatal plosive, /c/. In the Aymara, Greenlandic, Uzbek, Quechua, and Tatar languages, Q is a voiceless uvular plosive. [q] is also used in the IPA for the voiceless uvular plosive, as well as in most transliteration schemes of Semitic languages for the "emphatic" qop sound.
In Maltese and Võro, Q denotes the glottal stop.
In Chinese Hanyu Pinyin, Q is used to represent the sound [t??], which is close to English "ch" in "cheese".
In Fijian, Q represents the prenasalized voiced velar plosive [?g].
In Xhosa and Zulu, Q represents the postalveolar click [k!].
Q, which is rarely seen in a word without a U next to it in English, is the second most rarely used letter in the English language. The Q represents a voiceless velar plosive, contrary to the belief that it represents a labialized voiceless velar plosive. If this was the case, their would be no need for the "U" at the end.
The lowercase Q is usually written as a lowercase O with a line below it, with or without a "tail". It is usually typed without due to the major difference betwee ...