Che, Cha or Chu (Ч ч; italics:
Ч ч) is a letter of the Cyrillic script.It commonly represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate pronounced as //tʃ//, 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.
The letter Che (Ч ч) resembles an upside-down lowercase Latin H, as well as resembling the digit 4, especially in digital or open-ended form.
The name of Che in the Early Cyrillic alphabet was (črĭvĭ), meaning "worm".
In the Cyrillic numeral system, Che had a value of 90.
In all Slavic languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet, except Russian, Che represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate pronounced as //tʃ//.
In Russian, Che usually represents the voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate pronounced as //t͡ɕ//, like the Mandarin pronunciation of j in pinyin. However, in a few words, it is pronounced as pronounced as //tʂ//, like in Russian: лучше. Ч/ч is also pronounced as pronounced as //tʂ// in Serbian, as the Serbian letter Ћ/ћ is used for the pronounced as //t͡ɕ// sound.
In Russian, in a few words, it represents pronounced as //ʂ// (like English (sh) in "shape"): Russian: что, чтобы, нарочно.
The 1955 version of Hanyu pinyin contained the Che for the sound [tɕ] (for which later the letter j was used),[1] 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.
In some varieties of Western Cyrillic, Ҁ was used for 90, and Ч was used for 60 instead of Ѯ.