Che (Cyrillic)

Che, Cha or Chu (Ч ч; italics: Ч ч ) is a letter of the Cyrillic script.

It commonly represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate, like $⟨tch⟩$ in "switch" or $⟨ch⟩$ in "choice".

In English, it is romanized most often as $⟨ch⟩$ but sometimes as $⟨tch⟩$, like in French. In German, it can be transcribed as $⟨tsch⟩$. In linguistics, it is transcribed as $⟨č⟩$ so "Tchaikovsky" (Чайковский in Russian) may be transcribed as Chaykovskiy or Čajkovskij.

Form
The letter Che (Ч ч) resembles an upside-down lowercase H|Latin H, as well as resembling the digit 4, especially in digital or open-ended form.

History
The name of Che in the Early Cyrillic alphabet was (črĭvĭ), meaning "worm".

In the Cyrillic numeral system, Che had a value of 90.

Slavic languages
In all Slavic languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet, except Russian, Che represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate.

In Russian, Che usually represents the voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate, like the Mandarin pronunciation of j in pinyin. However, in a few words, it is pronounced as, like in лучше. Ч/ч is also pronounced as in Serbian, as the Serbian letter Ћ/ћ is used for the  sound.

In Russian, in a few words, it represents (like English $⟨sh⟩$  in "shape"): что, чтобы, нарочно.

In China
The 1955 version of Hanyu pinyin contained the Che for the sound [tɕ] (for which later the letter j was used), apparently because of its similarity to the Bopomofo letterㄐ.

The Latin Zhuang alphabet used a modified Hindu-Arabic numeral 4, strongly resembling Che, from 1957 to 1986 to represent the fourth (falling) tone. In 1986, it was replaced by the Latin letter X.

Related letters and other similar characters

 * 4 : 4 - Number that very closely resembles Che, especially in digital or open ended form
 * C c : C|Latin letter C - the same sound in Malay, Indonesian, Italian
 * Č č : Č|Latin letter C with caron
 * Ç ç : Ç|Latin letter C with cedilla - an Albanian, Azerbaijani, Kurdish, Turkish, and Turkmen letter
 * Ĉ ĉ : Ĉ|Latin letter C with circumflex, used in Esperanto language
 * Tx : Digraph Tx, used in Basque and Catalan.
 * Ch : Digraph Ch
 * Cs : Digraph Cs
 * Cz : Digraph Cz
 * Ҷ ҷ : Ҷ|Cyrillic letter Che with descender
 * Ӵ ӵ : Ӵ|Cyrillic letter Che with diaeresis
 * Ҹ ҹ : Ҹ|Cyrillic letter Che with vertical stroke
 * Ꚇ ꚇ : Cyrillic letter Cche
 * Ɥ ɥ : Latin letter turned H
 * Վ վ : Վ|Armenian letter Vev
 * Կ կ : Կ|Armenian letter Ken

Explanatory footnotes
In some varieties of Western Cyrillic, Ҁ was used for 90, and Ч was used for 60 instead of Ѯ.