descender (i.e., downward vertical tail) extending from the right side of the bowl, with or without a swash (i.e., flourish), or even a reversed lowercase p. The "q"'s descender is usually typed without a swash due to the major style difference typically seen between the descenders of the "g" (a loop) and "q" (vertical). When handwritten, or as part of a handwriting font, the descender of the "q" sometimes finishes with a rightward swash to distinguish it from the letter "g" (or, particularly in mathematics, the digit "9"). Pronunciation and use Phonetic and phonemic transcription The International Phonetic Alphabet uses for the voiceless uvular stop. English standard orthography In English, the digraph most often denotes the cluster ; however, in borrowings from French, it represents , as in 'plaque'. See the list of English words containing Q not followed by U. Q is the second least frequently used letter in the English language (after Z), with a frequency of just 0.1% in words. Q has the fourth fewest English words where it is the first letter, after X, Z, and Y. Other orthographies In most European languages written in the Latin script, such as in Romance and Germanic languages, appears almost exclusively in the digraph . In French, Occitan, Catalan and Portuguese, represents or ; in Spanish, it represents . replaces for before front vowels and , since in those languages represents a fricative or affricate before front vowels. In Italian represents (where is the semivowel allophone of ). In Albanian, Q represents as in Shqip. It is not considered to be part of the Cornish (Standard Written Form), Estonian, Icelandic, Irish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Scottish Gaelic, Slovenian, Turkish, or Welsh alphabets. has a wide variety of other pronunciations in some European languages and in non-European languages that have adopted the Latin alphabet. Other uses The capital letter Q is used as the currency sign for the Guatemalan quetzal. The Roman numeral Q is sometimes used to represent the number 500,000. In Turkey the use of the letter Q was banned between 1928 and 2013. This constituted a problem for the Kurdish population in Turkey as the letter was a part of the Kurdish alphabet. The ones who used the letter Q, were able to be prosecuted and sentenced to prison terms ranging from six months to two years. In the video game Quake the letter is stylized as