The voiceless velar lateral fricative is a very rare speech sound. As one element of an affricate, it is found for example in Zulu and Xhosa (see velar lateral ejective affricate). However, a simple fricative has only been reported from a few languages in the Caucasus and New Guinea.
Archi, a Northeast Caucasian language of Dagestan, has four velar lateral fricatives which are voiceless: plain, labialized, fortis, and labialized fortis . Although clearly fricatives, these are further forward than velars in most languages, and might better be called prevelar. Archi also has a voiced fricative, as well as a voiceless and several ejective lateral velar affricates, but no alveolar lateral fricatives or affricates.
In New Guinea, some of the Chimbu languages such as Melpa, Middle Wahgi, and Nii, have a voiceless velar lateral fricative, which they write with a double-bar el (Ⱡ, ⱡ). This sound also appears in syllable coda position as an allophone of the voiced velar lateral fricative in Kuman.
The IPA has no separate symbol for these sounds, but it can be transcribed as a devoiced raised velar lateral approximant, ⟨ʟ̝̊⟩, in which the devoicing ring diacritic is placed above the letter to avoid clashing with the raising diacritic. Furthermore, the "belt" of the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative on the symbol of the corresponding lateral approximant forms the basis for occasional ad hoc symbols for the other voiceless lateral fricatives:
Indeed, SIL International has added these symbols to the Private Use Areas of their Charis and Doulos fonts, as U+F268 ().
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