El (Cyrillic)


El is a letter of the Cyrillic script.
El commonly represents the alveolar lateral approximant. In Slavic languages it may be either palatalized or slightly velarized; see [|below].

Allography

In some typefaces the Cyrillic letter El has a grapheme which may be confused with the Cyrillic letter Pe . Note that Pe has a straight left leg, without the hook. An alternative form of El is more common in Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Serbian.

History

The Cyrillic letter El was derived from the Greek letter lambda.
In the Early Cyrillic alphabet its name was , meaning "people".
In the Cyrillic numeral system, Л had a value of 30.

Pronunciation

As used in the alphabets of various languages, El represents the following sounds:
The phoneme in Slavic languages has two realizations: hard and soft – see palatalization for details. Serbian and Macedonian orthographies use a separate letter Љ for the soft – it looks as a ligature of El with the soft sign . In these languages, denotes only hard . Pronunciation of hard is sometimes given as, but it is always more velar than in French or German.
Slavic languages except Serbian and Macedonian use another orthographic convention to distinguish between hard and soft, so can denote either variant depending on the subsequent letter.
The pronunciations shown in the table are the primary ones for each language.
LanguagePosition in
alphabet		Pronunciation
Belarusian13th
Bulgarian12th
Macedonian14th
Mongolian13th
Ossetian16th
Russian13th
Serbian13th
Ukrainian16th

In addition, л was formerly used in Chukchi to represent the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative but has since been replaced by ԓ.

Related letters and other similar characters