Cyrillic small letter Bashkir ka

It represents a voiceless q, made farther back than к.

Linguists call this a voiceless uvular stop: the back of the tongue briefly closes against the soft area at the top of the throat. It is the Bashkir q, not the ordinary k written with к.

In Bashkir words such as ҡурҡаҡ, ҡ appears at the beginning, middle, and end. It remains the same letter throughout. Fonts can draw its shape differently without changing which character it is.

How did ҡ get into Bashkir writing?

In 1861, N. I. Ilminsky used ќ in a Bashkir text for the sound now written ҡ. Kulaev's Cyrillic Bashkir alphabet is documented from 1912; these are earlier recorded spellings and alphabets, not a single invention of today's glyph.

Bashkir writing moved from Arabic-based forms to Latin and then to Russian-based Cyrillic by 1940. A 1924 Tatar-Bashkir Latin plan used pairs of letters for special sounds. Across those changes, the practical aim was to keep Bashkir's back q distinct from к.

Is Bashkir ҡ the same as к or қ?

No: each letter belongs to a different spelling.

к is the ordinary Cyrillic ka, used for the k sound. қ is a separate Cyrillic letter used in Kazakh spelling. Bashkir ҡ writes the Bashkir q sound; the similar-looking letters are not interchangeable.