English has one lateral phoneme: the lateral approximant , which in many accents has two
allophones. One, found before vowels (and /j/) as in
lady or
fly (or
value), is called
clear l, pronounced as the
alveolar lateral approximant with a "neutral" position of the body of the tongue. The other variant, so-called
dark l, found before consonants or word-finally, as in
bold or
tell, is pronounced as the
velarized alveolar lateral approximant with the tongue assuming a spoon-like shape with its back part raised, which gives the sound a - or -like resonance. In some languages, like
Albanian, those two sounds are different phonemes.
Malsia e Madhe Gheg Albanian and
Salamina Arvanitika even have the three-way distinction of laterals , and .
East Slavic languages contrast and but do not have [l]. In many British accents (e.g.
Cockney), dark may undergo
vocalization through the reduction and loss of contact between the tip of the tongue and the alveolar ridge, becoming a rounded back vowel or glide. This process turns
tell into , as must have happened with
talk or
walk at some stage. A similar process happened during the development of many other languages, including
Brazilian Portuguese,
Old French, and
Polish, in all three of these resulting in
voiced velar approximant or
voiced labio-velar approximant , whence
Modern French sauce as compared with
Spanish salsa, or Polish
Wisła (pronounced ) as compared with English
Vistula. In central dialects of
Venetian, intervocalic has turned into a semivocalic , so that the written word
ła bała is pronounced . The orthography uses the letter
ł to represent this phoneme (it specifically represents not the sound but the phoneme that is, in some dialects, and, in others, ). Many aboriginal
Australian languages have a series of three or four lateral approximants, as do various dialects of
Irish. Rarer lateral consonants include the retroflex laterals that can be found in many
languages of India and in some
Swedish dialects, and the
voiceless alveolar lateral fricative , found in many
Native North American languages,
Welsh and
Zulu. In
Adyghe and some
Athabaskan languages like
Hän, both voiceless and voiced alveolar lateral fricatives occur, but there is no approximant. Many of these languages also have lateral
affricates. Some languages have palatal or velar voiceless lateral fricatives or affricates, such as
Dahalo and
Zulu, but the IPA has no symbols for such sounds. However, appropriate symbols are easy to make by adding a lateral-fricative belt to the symbol for the corresponding lateral approximant (see below). Also, a devoicing diacritic may be added to the approximant. Nearly all languages with such lateral obstruents also have the approximant. However, there are a number of exceptions, many of them located in the
Pacific Northwest area of the United States. For example,
Tlingit has but no . Other examples from the same area include
Nuu-chah-nulth and
Kutenai, and elsewhere,
Mongolian,
Chukchi, and
Kabardian.
Standard Tibetan has a
voiceless lateral approximant, usually romanized as
lh, as in the name
Lhasa. A
uvular lateral approximant has been reported to occur in some speakers of
American English.
Pashto has a
retroflex lateral flap that becomes
voiced retroflex approximant when it is at the end of a syllable and a word. There are a large number of lateral
click consonants; 17 occur in
!Xóõ. Lateral
trills are also possible, but they do not occur in any known language. They may be pronounced by initiating or with an especially forceful airflow. There is no symbol for them in the IPA. They are sometimes used to imitate
bird calls, and they are a component of
Donald Duck talk. ==List of laterals==