Voiceless dental and alveolar lateral fricatives


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 lateral fricatives is, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is . The symbol is called "belted l" and should not be confused with "l with tilde",, which transcribes a different sound, the velarized alveolar lateral approximant. It should also be distinguished from a voiceless alveolar lateral approximant, although the fricative is sometimes incorrectly described as a "voiceless l", a description fitting only of the approximant.
Several Welsh names beginning with this sound have been borrowed into English, where they either retain the Welsh spelling but are pronounced with an , or are substituted with .

Features

Features of the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative:

Occurrence

Although the sound is rare among European languages outside the Caucasus, it is fairly common among indigenous languages of the Americas such as Nahuatl, Navajo, and North Caucasian languages, such as Avar. It is also found in African languages like Zulu, Asian languages like Chukchi and some Yue dialects like Taishanese, and several Formosan languages and a number of dialects in Taiwan.
The sound is found in one of the artificial languages invented by J.R.R. Tolkien, Sindarin.

Dental or denti-alveolar

Alveolar

Semitic languages

The sound is conjectured as a phoneme for Proto-Semitic language, usually transcribed as ś; it has evolved into Arabic, Hebrew :
Amongst Semitic languages, the sound still exists in contemporary Soqotri and Mehri. In Ge'ez, it is written with the letter Śawt.

Capital letter

Since the IPA letter "ɬ" has been adopted into the standard orthographies for many native North American languages, a capital letter L with belt "Ɬ" was requested by academics and added to the Unicode Standard version 7.0 in 2014 at U+A7AD.