Lateral Consonant - Examples

Examples

English has one lateral phoneme: the lateral approximant /l/, which in many accents has two allophones. One, found before vowels as in lady or fly, 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. East Slavic languages contrast and but do not have a plain .

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 something like . A similar process happened during the development of many languages, including Brazilian Portuguese, Old French, and Polish, in all three of these resulting in or, whence Modern French sauce as compared with Spanish salsa, or Polish Wisła (pronounced ) as compared with English Vistula.

In central and Venice dialects of Vèneto, intervocalic /l/ has turned into a semivocalic, so that the written word ła bała is pronounced . The orthography uses the letter ł to represent this phoneme (not that it doesn't specifically represent the sound, it represents the phoneme which in some dialects is and in some ).

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 /ɬ/, 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 these sounds. However, appropriate symbols are easy to make by adding a lateral-fricative belt to the symbol for the corresponding lateral approximant (see below). Failing that, a devoicing diacritic is 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. For example, Tlingit has /tɬ, tɬʰ, tɬʼ, ɬ, ɬʼ/ but no /l/. Other examples from the same area include Nuu-chah-nulth and Kutenai, and elsewhere, Chukchi and Kabardian.

Standard Tibetan has a voiceless lateral approximant, usually romanized as lh, as in the name Lhasa.

Pashto has a retroflex lateral flap.

There are a large number of lateral click consonants; seventeen occur in !Xóõ.

Lateral trills are possible (but occur in no known language). It is also possible to articulate uvular laterals, but they are also too hard to pronounce to occur as a phoneme in any known language.