Voiceless alveolar lateral fricative

The voiceless alveolar lateral fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents voiceless dental, alveolar, and postalveolar fricatives is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is K. The symbol is called "belted l" and should not be confused with "l with tilde", , which corresponds to a different sound, the velarized alveolar lateral approximant. It should also be distinguished from a voiceless alveolar lateral approximant, although either are often described as a "voiceless l".

Features

Features of the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative:

Its manner of articulation is fricative, which means it is produced by constricting air flow through a narrow channel at the place of articulation, causing turbulence.
Its place of articulation is alveolar, which means it is articulated with either the tip or the blade of the tongue against the alveolar ridge, termed respectively apical and laminal.
Its phonation type is voiceless, which means it is produced without vibrations of the vocal cords.
It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth.
It is a lateral consonant, which means it is produced by allowing the airstream to flow over the sides of the tongue, rather than the middle of the tongue.
The airstream mechanism is pulmonic egressive, which means it is articulated by pushing air out of the lungs and through the vocal tract, rather than from the glottis or the mouth.

In English

English does not possess this sound, but English speakers can approximate it by pronouncing the sounds and [l simultaneously. A phonetically similar sound, the voiceless lateral approximant, occurs in English after /p/ and /k/ in words like 'plead' and 'clean'. The voiceless approximant (but not the fricative) was also found in Old English in words like hlūd "loud".

In other languages

Welsh

In Welsh spelling, the digraph ll represents the voiceless lateral fricative. It is common in place names, many of which begin with Llan, the enclosure connected with a church or parish. The personal name Floyd, an anglicised spelling of llwyd ("grey"), was written with an fl in an attempt to capture both the lateral and fricative aspects of this sound. The more Welsh version of the name, Lloyd, is usually pronounced with an English ^* sound.

Xhosa and Zulu

In Xhosa and Zulu spelling, the letters hl correspond to this sound.

Tera

Written as tl -- see ^*

Totonac

In the languages of the Totonac family, the voiceless lateral fricative is represented by the digraph "lh."

Damin

Damin has an ingressive voiceless lateral fricative . That is, the sound is made by inhaling air over the sides of the tongue. This is the only confirmed example in the world of a phoneme regularly produced by inhaling.

Proto-Semitic

The sound is assumed as a phoneme for Proto-Semitic, usually transcribed as , since it evolved into Arabic , Hebrew, :

Proto-Semitic	Akkadian	Arabic		Phoenician		Hebrew		Aramaic		Ge'ez
		ش		שׂ		שׂ		ሰ

Amongst Semitic languages, the sound still exists in contemporary Soqotri.

Toisanese

In the Taishan dialect of Chinese, this sound almost sounds like a thl combination and is sometimes used where there is an s sound in Cantonese. but not always. example is in cantonese small is sai but in taishanese it is thlai, however hand in cantonese is sau but in taishanese it is siu, so thl is sometimes used, not always.

Icelandic

In Icelandic, the digraph ll represents the sound , and rl represents .

The voiceless lateral approximant

In Icelandic spelling, the initial letters hl, as well as the l in lp, lt, lk are voiceless lateral approximants. Tibetan also has this, for example in the city name Lhasa. However, these sounds lack the striking fricative quality of the Welsh and Zulu lateral fricative.

Gourt Home::Gourt :: Voiceless alveolar lateral fricative