qiǎo is a spoken-Mandarin reading heard in northern speech: 家雀儿 (sparrow) and the dialect word 雀盲眼 (night blindness). In careful or written Chinese the same character is read què.
隹 underneath is the indexing radical, a pictograph of a stubby-tailed bird with body and feet. It places 雀 in the short-tailed-bird family alongside 雁 wild goose, 雄 male bird, 集 flock gathering on a tree.
小 sits on top and supplies the diminutive sense: a 雀 is a small bird, a sparrow rather than a hawk. Small-on-top over bird-below reads cleanly as a meaning compound with no phonetic role.
