| Script: | Cyrillic |
| Type: | Alphabet |
| Typedesc: | ic |
| Che | |
| Phonemes: | [{{IPA link|tʃ}}], [{{IPA link|tʃʰ}}], [{{IPA link|tɕʰ}}], [{{IPA link|tʂ}}], [{{IPA link|tɕ}}] |
| Number: | 90, 60 (Cyrillic numerals) |
| Fam1: | Ⱍ |
| Language: | Old Church Slavonic |
| Unicode: | U+0427, U+0447 |
| Letter: | Ч ч |
| Equivalents: | Ch ch, Č č, Ç ç |
Che (Ч ч; italics:
Ч ч) is a letter of the Cyrillic script.It commonly represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate pronounced as //tʃ//, like the (tch) in "switch" or (ch) in "choice".
In English, it is romanized typically as (ch) but sometimes as (tch), like in French. In German, it can be transcribed as (tsch). In Slavic languages using the Latin Alphabet, 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. Cursive forms look like lowercase cursive forms of the letter R.
The name of Che in the Early Cyrillic alphabet was Чрьвь (črĭvĭ), meaning "worm".
In the Cyrillic numeral system, Che originally did not have a value, however, by the 1300s it started to be used with the numeric value 90 as a replacement for Koppa, some varieties that preserved Koppa around this time used Che with the value 60 instead of the usual letter for it, Ksi. Nowadays, Koppa is not used anymore in any variety, and Che has fully replaced it as the letter with the numeric value 90.[1]
Except for Russian and Serbian, all Cyrillic-alphabet Slavic languages use Che to represent the voiceless postalveolar affricate pronounced as //tʃ// (the ch sound in English).
In Russian, Che usually represents the voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate pronounced as //t͡ɕ// (like the Mandarin pronunciation of j in pinyin). It is occasionally exceptionally pronounced as:
In Serbian, Che is always pronounced as pronounced as //tʂ// (Latin: č), as the letter Tshe (Ћ/ћ; Latin: ć), which is unique to Serbian, is always used for the pronounced as //t͡ɕ// sound. Loanwords using /tʃ/ are typically transliterated to Che rather than Tshe.
The 1955 version of Hanyu pinyin contained the Che for the sound [tɕ] (for which later the letter j was used),[2] apparently because of its similarity to the Bopomofo letterㄐ.
See also: Faux Cyrillic. 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.
