Lateral Consonants: Beyond the Letter L

When most people think of lateral consonants, they think of /l/—the liquid consonant in English, French, Spanish, and dozens of other familiar languages. But the lateral category is far richer than this single symbol suggests. A lateral consonant is any consonant in which the airflow is blocked centrally (the tongue tip touches the alveolar ridge or palate) while air continues to pass around one or both sides. Vary the place of articulation, voicing, manner, and secondary articulations, and you get a family of sounds that ranges from the everyday English /l/ to the exotic lateral clicks of Khoisan.

Lateral Approximants and Fricatives

The lateral approximant /l/ is produced with the tongue tip touching the alveolar ridge and the sides of the tongue lowered. The voiced alveolar lateral approximant is the most cross-linguistically common lateral, appearing in roughly 75 % of languages surveyed by PHOIBLE. A retroflex variant /ɭ/—with the tongue tip curled back—appears in South Asian languages like Tamil and in Australian Aboriginal languages like Warlpiri. Lateral fricatives /ɬ/ (voiceless) and /ɮ/ (voiced) route turbulent airflow over the sides of the tongue; Welsh Ll (/ɬ/) is the most familiar example for European audiences. See all lateral symbols on the IPA Chart.

Lateral Affricates and Clicks

Lateral affricates combine a central stop closure with a lateral fricative release. The Tibetan language, some indigenous American languages, and several Northwest Caucasian languages use /tɬ/ and /tɬʰ/ as distinct phonemes. At the extreme end, lateral clicks /ǁ/—produced with a lateral release of the velaric suction mechanism—appear in the Khoisan languages of southern Africa and were borrowed into Nguni Bantu languages like Xhosa and Zulu.

For language learners, laterals often cause interference from the native language. English has a well-known distinction between clear /l/ (before vowels, as in leaf) and dark /ɫ/ (before consonants or word-finally, as in feel). Spanish /l/ is neither dark nor retroflex. Japanese has no /l/ at all, using a flap /ɾ/ where other languages use /l/ or /r/. Browse languages with large inventories to find which make the richest use of the lateral category.