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Ch is a digraph in the Roman alphabet. It is treated as a letter of its own in the Spanish, Chamorro, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Igbo, Quechua, Guarani, Welsh, Cornish, Breton and Belarusian Łacinka alphabets. In Vietnamese, it also used to be considered a letter for collation purposes but this is no longer common. In the Ossete Latin alphabet, it was used to write the sound /t∫/.
The Romans used ch to transliterate the sound of the Greek letter chi in words borrowed from that language. In classical times, Greeks pronounced this as an aspirated voiceless velar plosive [kʰ]. In post-classical Greek (Koine and Modern) this sound developed into a fricative.
"Ch" represents [kʰ] in Upper Sorbian.
The most common English sound for this digraph is the voiceless postalveolar affricate [tʃ], such as in church.
In English words coming mostly from Greek chi, it is the voiceless velar plosive [k], as in mechanics or chemistry.
In English words of French origin, "ch" represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative [ʃ]. For example machine.
In words of Scottish origin it represents the voiceless velar fricative x. For example loch.
In Breton "ch" represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative [ʃ].
This digraph should not be confused with "c'h" [x].
In French "ch" represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative [ʃ].
In words of Greek origin, it represents [k] as in chiromancie.
In Portuguese, "ch" represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative [ʃ].
In Occitan, "ch" represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate [tʃ], but in some dialects it is a voiceless alveolar affricate [ts].
Ch is the fourth letter of the Chamorro language and its sound is [ts].
In Spanish as well as others, "ch" represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate [tʃ].
The letter ch is a digraph consisting of the sequence of Latin alphabet graphemes C and H; however, it represents a single phoneme (pronounced as a voiceless postalveolar affricate [t͡ʃ] in both Castillian and Latin American, or a voiceless postalveolar fricative [ʃ] in Andalusian). It has its own name (che) and is traditionally considered a distinct letter of the alphabet; until 1994 it was treated as a single entity in Spanish collation order, inserted between C and D.
The Spanish alphabet consists of the following 29 letters: a, b, c, ch, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, ll, m, n, ñ, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z.
Since April 1994, when a votation in the X Congress of the Association of Spanish Language Academies ruled the adoption of the standard Latin alphabet collation rules, so that for purposes of collation the digraph ch is now considered a sequence of two distinct characters and dictionaries now place words starting with ch- between those starting with ce- and ci-. In capitalized form, Ch is used at the beginning of a sentence (Chiste, English: joke), while CH or Ch can be used for a standalone letter in lists, etc.
This reform only have an effect on the alphabetic collation of words, not on the structure of the alphabet, which the digraphs ch and ll are still part of.
The letter Ch is equal to other letters of the traditional Spanish alphabet (as is Ll). But before 1994 it came between C and D. Thus, the word "cacho" (English: piece) came after "caco" (English: thief) in an alphabetical list. Names beginning with Ch were listed in the same way in a phonebook, dictionary or encyclopedia. In a crossword, it takes up two squares (following the rule to be "one letter, two characters"), although in some old ones one can find the ch taking up only one square.
In Italian, "ch" represents the voiceless velar plosive [k] before -e and -i.
In Interlingua, "ch" represents the sound [k] in any position.
In the Goidelic languages, several Germanic languages, many Slavic languages that use the Latin alphabet instead of the Cyrillic alphabet, Welsh and others, "ch" represents the voiceless velar fricative [x]. Additionally, "ch" is frequently used in transliterating into many European languages from Greek, Hebrew, Yiddish, Arabic, and many others.
Breton has evolved a modified form of this digraph, "c'h" for representing [x], as opposed to "ch", which stands for [ʃ]. In Manx, "ch" stands for [x], while [tʃ] is represented by "çh".
In Rheinische Dokumenta, "ch" represents [x], as opposed to "ch", which stands for [ç].
Ch in Slovak language labels a syllabic sound /x/ (/ɣ/ in voiced position). At the beginning of the sentence it is used in two different variants- "CH" or "Ch". It can be followed by Consonant (Chrbtica - Spine), Vowel (Chémia - Chemistry) or Diphthong (Chiazmus - Chiasmus).
The letter ch is a digraph consisting of the sequence of Latin alphabet graphemes C and H, however it is a single phoneme (pronounced as a voiceless velar fricative [x]) and represents a single entity in Czech collation order, inserted between H and I. In capitalized form, Ch is used at the beginning of a sentence (Chechtal se. "He giggled."), while CH or Ch can be used for standalone letter in lists etc.
The letter Ch is equal to other letters of the Czech alphabet. It comes between H and I. Thus, the word "chemie" "chemistry" comes after "fyzika" "physics" in an alphabetical list. Names beginning with Ch are listed in the same way in a phonebook. In a crossword it takes only one square. Only few Czech words treat CH as two separate letters, e.g., "puchoblík", from "pucovat" (German putzen clean) and "hoblík" "plane (tool)".
In the 15th century, the Czech language used to contain many digraphs like modern Polish does but most of them were replaced by single letters with diacritic marks by the reform of Jan Hus. Besides ch, there is only one digraph used in the Czech language - dž, representing voiced postalveolar affricate. However, "ch" is the only Czech digraph which is treated as a single letter.
Ch has been used in the Polish language to represent the "soft h" /x/ as it is pronounced in the Polish word chleb "bread", and the h to represent "hard h", /ɦ/ where it is distinct, as it is pronounced in the Polish word hak "hook". Between World War One and World War Two, the Polish intelligentsia used to exaggerate the "hardness" of the hard Polish h to aid themselves in proper spelling. In most present-day Polish dialects, however, ch and h are uniformly collapsed as /x/.
In German, "ch" represents two allophones: the voiceless velar fricative [x] when following back vowels or [a] (the so-called "Ach-Laut") and the voiceless palatal fricative [ç] in all other positions (the so-called "Ich-Laut"). A similar allophonic variation is assumed to have existed in Old English.
In German, it represents [k] before -s, and an initial Ch (which only appears in loanwords) may also be pronounced [k] in southern varieties, and is always pronounced [k] when a consonant follows the initial Ch.
The Rheinische Dokumenta writing system uses "ch", for the voiceless palatal fricative [ç], while "ch" represents [x].
In Vietnamese, "ch" represents the voiceless palatal plosive [c] in the initial position. It is -[k̟] in the final position, the pronunciation is identical to the final "k".
In Xhosa and Zulu, ch represents the voiceless aspirated velar dental click [kǀʰ].
In Mandarin Chinese ch is used in Pinyin to represent an aspirated voiceless retroflex affricate /tʂʰ/.
In Palauan, ch represents a glottal stop [ʔ].
International Morse code provides a unitary code for Ch used in several non-English languages, namely — — — —.
In the Czech extension to Braille the letter Ch is represented as the dot pattern ⠻. English literary braille also has a single cell dedicated to <ch> (dots 1–6), which stands for "child" in isolation, but this is considered a single-cell contraction rather than a separate letter.
In computing, Ch is represented as a sequence of C and H, not as a single character; only the historical KOI-8 ČS2 encoding contained Ch as a single character.
All principal characters created by Roberto Gómez Bolaños for his TV shows have names starting with Ch, including Chompiras, Dr. Chapatín, and perhaps most famously El Chapulín Colorado, a superhero whose costume has a "CH" inscribed by a heart (analogous to the way Superman's costume has an S inscribed on a diamond). Bolaños' artistic name was Chespirito, also with a Ch (Chespir would be a Spanish substandard pronunciation of Shakespeare; suffix -ito means "little").