The letter has been used in various Latin

Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...

 orthographies

Orthography

The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...

 for Turkic languages, such as Azeri or the Jaŋalif orthography for Tatar

Tatar alphabet

Two scripts are currently used for the Tatar language: Cyrillic and Latin.-Introduction:While a Tatar version of the Latin alphabet called Jaŋalif had been in use during the 1930s, there is controversy in the matter of Latin-based Tatar alphabet for İdel-Ural Tatar. One dimension of the...

. It usually represents a voiced velar fricative

Voiced velar fricative

The voiced velar fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in various spoken languages. It is not found in English today, but did exist in Old English...

, but is sometimes used for a voiced uvular fricative. All orthographies using it have been phased out, so the letter is not well-supported in fonts. It can still be seen on pre-1983 banknotes issued by the People’s Republic of China.

Historically, it is derived from a hand-written form of the small Latin letter q, circa 1900. The majuscule is then based on the minuscule. Its use for [ɣ] stems from the linguistic tradition of representing such sounds (and similars) by q in Turkic languages and in transcriptions of Arabic or Persian (c.f. kaf vs. qof).

In alphabetical order, it comes between G and H.

Unrelated letters transcribed gha, typically representing a voiced aspirated stop

Breathy voice

Breathy voice is a phonation in which the vocal cords vibrate, as they do in normal voicing, but are held further apart, so that a larger volume of air escapes between them. This produces an audible noise...

 rather than a fricative, occur in scripts descended from Brāhmī script

Brāhmī script

Brāhmī is the modern name given to the oldest members of the Brahmic family of scripts. The best-known Brāhmī inscriptions are the rock-cut edicts of Ashoka in north-central India, dated to the 3rd century BCE. These are traditionally considered to be early known examples of Brāhmī writing...

.

Modern Replacements

• Azeri: Ğ, ğ
• Tatar: Г, г (Cyrillic), Ğ, ğ (Latin)
• Bashkir: Ғ,ғ
• Uyghur: غ (Arabic), Ғ, ғ (Cyrillic), GH gh (Latin)
• Yakut: Ҕ, ҕ
• Uzbek: Gʻ gʻ

Unicode

In Unicode

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...

, the majuscule  is encoded in the Latin Extended-B block at U+01A2 and the minuscule  is encoded at U+01A3. It has been misnamed by ISO

International Organization for Standardization

The International Organization for Standardization , widely known as ISO, is an international standard-setting body composed of representatives from various national standards organizations. Founded on February 23, 1947, the organization promulgates worldwide proprietary, industrial and commercial...

as “LATIN LETTER OI”.