kh

Kh is a digraph formed by the letters k and h. It is not a distinct letter in the Latin alphabet, but it is widely used in various languages and transliteration systems to represent a single consonant sound. The exact phoneme associated with kh varies by language, but it is commonly linked to a voiceless fricative produced at the velar or uvular place of articulation.

In Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Kurdish and related languages that use the Arabic script, خ is commonly transliterated as “kh.” It represents the voiceless velar fricative /x/ (a sound similar to the Scottish loch). The same transliteration is used in many Latin-script renderings of these languages.

In Cyrillic-script languages, several romanization schemes render the Cyrillic Х as “kh,” reflecting its /x/ sound in languages such as Russian, Ukrainian, Kazakh, and Uzbek. Thus kh appears in transliterations of names and words from these languages.

In Devanagari and other Indic scripts, the consonant ख is transliterated as “kh”, representing an aspirated voiceless velar plosive /kʰ/ rather than a fricative. This contrasts with the Arabic-derived usage, illustrating how kh can encode different phonemes depending on the script and language.

Georgian and Armenian transliteration also use kh to denote certain voiceless fricatives, such as /χ/ in some contexts. As a result, kh functions as a cross-language transliteration convention rather than a single, fixed sound.

Common uses in proper names and loanwords—such as khan, Khiva, Khartoum, and khaki—reflect its broad adoption across language families.