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Alateral is aconsonant in which theairstream proceeds along one or both of the sides of the tongue, but it is blocked by the tongue from going through the middle of the mouth. An example of a lateral consonant is theEnglishL, as inLarry. Lateral consonants contrast withcentral consonants, in which the airstream flows through the center of the mouth.
For the most common laterals, the tip of the tongue makes contact with the upper teeth (seedental consonant) or the upper gum (seealveolar consonant), but there are many other possible places for laterals to be made. The most common laterals areapproximants and belong to the class ofliquids, but lateralfricatives andaffricates are also common in some parts of the world. Some languages, such as theIwaidja andIlgar languages ofAustralia, havelateral flaps, and others, such as theXhosa andZulu languages ofAfrica, havelateral clicks.
When pronouncing thelabiodental fricatives[f]and[v], the lip blocks the airflow in the centre of the vocal tract, so the airstream proceeds along the sides instead. Nevertheless, they are not considered lateral consonants because the airflow never goes over the side of the tongue. No known language makes a distinction between lateral and non-lateral labiodentals.Plosives are never lateral, but they may havelateral release.Nasals are almost never lateral either, but reported inNzema, and some languages havelateral nasal clicks. For consonants articulated in the throat (laryngeals), the lateral distinction is not made by any language, although pharyngeal and epiglottal laterals are reportedly possible.[1]
English has one lateral phoneme: the lateral approximant/l/, which in many accents has twoallophones. One, found before vowels (and /j/) as inlady orfly (orvalue), is calledclear l, pronounced as thealveolar lateral approximant[l] with a "neutral" position of the body of the tongue. The other variant, so-calleddark l, found before consonants or word-finally, as inbold ortell, is pronounced as theuvularized alveolar lateral approximant[ɫ] with the tongue assuming a spoon-like shape with its back part raised, which gives the sound a[w]- or[ʟ]-like resonance. In some languages, likeAlbanian, those two sounds are different phonemes.Malsia e Madhe Gheg Albanian andSalaminaArvanitika even have the three-way distinction of laterals/l/,/ʎ/ and/ɫ/.[2]East Slavic languages contrast[ɫ] and[lʲ] but do not have [l].
In many British accents (e.g.Cockney), dark[ɫ] may undergovocalization through the reduction and loss of contact between the tip of the tongue and the alveolar ridge, becoming a rounded back vowel or glide. This process turnstell into[tɛɰ], as must have happened withtalk[tɔːk] orwalk[wɔːk] at some stage. A similar process happened during the development of many other languages, includingBrazilian Portuguese,Old French, andPolish, in all three of these resulting invoiced velar approximant[ɰ] orvoiced labio-velar approximant[w], whenceModern Frenchsauce as compared withSpanishsalsa, or PolishWisła (pronounced[viswa]) as compared with EnglishVistula.
In central and Venice dialects ofVenetian, intervocalic/l/ has turned into a semivocalic[e̯], so that the written wordła bała is pronounced[abae̯a]. The orthography uses the letterł to represent this phoneme (it specifically represents not the[e̯] sound but the phoneme that is, in some dialects,[e̯] and, in others,[l]).
Many aboriginalAustralian languages have a series of three or four lateral approximants, as do various dialects ofIrish. Rarer lateral consonants include the retroflex laterals that can be found in manylanguages of India[citation needed] and in someSwedish dialects, and thevoiceless alveolar lateral fricative/ɬ/, found in manyNative North American languages,Welsh andZulu. InAdyghe and someAthabaskan languages likeHän, both voiceless and voiced alveolar lateral fricatives occur, but there is no approximant. Many of these languages also have lateralaffricates. Some languages have palatal or velar voiceless lateral fricatives or affricates, such asDahalo andZulu, but the IPA has no symbols for such sounds. However, appropriate symbols are easy to make by adding a lateral-fricative belt to the symbol for the corresponding lateral approximant (see below). Also, a devoicing diacritic may be added to the approximant.
Nearly all languages with such lateral obstruents also have the approximant. However, there are a number of exceptions, many of them located in thePacific Northwest area of the United States. For example,Tlingit has/tɬ,tɬʰ,tɬʼ,ɬ,ɬʼ/ but no/l/.[a] Other examples from the same area includeNuu-chah-nulth andKutenai, and elsewhere,Mongolian,Chukchi, andKabardian.
Standard Tibetan has avoiceless lateral approximant, usually romanized aslh, as in the nameLhasa.
Auvular lateral approximant has been reported to occur in some speakers ofAmerican English.[3]
Pashto has aretroflex lateral flap that becomesvoiced retroflex approximant when it is at the end of a syllable and a word.[citation needed]
There are a large number of lateralclick consonants; 17 occur in!Xóõ.
Lateraltrills are also possible, but they do not occur in any known language. They may be pronounced by initiating[ɬ] or[ɮ] with an especially forceful airflow. There is no symbol for them in the IPA. They are sometimes used to imitatebird calls, and they are a component ofDonald Duck talk.
Only the alveolar lateral fricatives have dedicated letters in the IPA proper, though the retroflex letters are 'implied'. The others are provided by theextIPA.
The IPA requires sounds to be defined as to centrality, as either central or lateral. However, languages may be ambiguous as to some consonants' laterality.[5] A well-known example is the liquid consonant in Japanese, represented in common transliteration systems as⟨r⟩, which can be recognized as a (post)alveolar tap/ɾ/,[6]alveolar lateral flap /ɺ/, (post)alveolar lateral approximant /l/, (post)alveolar approximant /ɹ/,[6]voiced retroflex stop /ɖ/,[7] and various less common forms.
A superscript ⟨ˡ⟩ is defined aslateral release.
Consonants may also be pronounced with simultaneous lateral and central airflow. This is well-known from speech pathology with alateral lisp. However, it also occurs in nondisordered speech in some southernArabic dialects and possibly someModern South Arabian languages, which have pharyngealized nonsibilant/ʪ̪ˤ/ and/ʫ̪ˤ/ (simultaneous[θ͜ɬˤ] and[ð͡ɮˤ]) and possibly a sibilant/ʪ/ (simultaneous[s͜ɬ]). Examples are/θˡˤaim/ 'pain' in the dialect ofAl-Rubūʽah and/ðˡˤahr/ 'back' and/ðˡˤabʕ/ 'hyena' inRijal Almaʽa.[8][9][10] (Here the ⟨ˡ⟩ indicates simultaneous laterality rather than lateral release.) Biblical Hebrew may have had non-emphatic central-lateral sibilants[ʃ͡ɬ] and[s͜ɬ], whileOld Arabic has been analyzed as having the emphatic central–lateral fricatives[θ͜ɬˤ],[ð͡ɮˤ] and[ʃ͡ɬˤ].[11]
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