Voiced dental and alveolar lateral approximants
consonantal sound
Voiced dental and alveolar lateral approximants are a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. It is familiar to English-speakers as the "l" sound in "lift". The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents them is ⟨l⟩.
As a sonorant, lateral approximants are nearly always voiced. Voiceless lateral approximants, /l̥/ are common in Sino-Tibetan languages, but uncommon elsewhere. In such cases, voicing typically starts about halfway through the hold of the consonant. No language is known to contrast such a sound with a voiceless alveolar lateral fricative [ɬ].
In a number of languages, including most varieties of English, the phoneme /l/ becomes velarized ("dark l") in certain contexts. By contrast, the non-velarized form is the "clear l" (also called "light l"), which occurs before and between vowels in certain English standards. Some languages have only clear l.
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This entry incorporates text from “Voiced dental and alveolar lateral approximants” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.