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Laterals are "L"-like consonants pronounced with an occlusion made somewhere along the axis of the tongue, while air from the lungs escapes at one side or both sides of the tongue.
Most commonly the tip of the tongue makes contact with the upper teeth (see: dental consonant) or the upper gum (the alveolar ridge) just behind the teeth (see: alveolar consonant). Most laterals are approximants and belong to the class of liquids.
English has the alveolar lateral [l], which in many accents has two allophones. One, found before vowels (as in lady or fly), is called clear [l], pronounced with a "neutral" position of the body of the tongue. The other variant, so-called dark [l] (found before consonants or word-finally as in bold or tell), is pronounced with the tongue assuming a spoon-like shape and its back part raised, which gives the sound an [u]-like resonance.
In many British accents (e.g. London English), dark [l] may undergo vocalisation through the reduction and loss of contact between the tip of the tongue the alveolar ridge, becoming a rounded back vowel or glide. This process turns tell into something like [tew].
The Italian gl and Spanish ll (in some accents) are palatal laterals. The palatal lateral is present as well in these languages: Catalan ll, French ill- (in some dialects), Portuguese lh, Quechua ll.
Rarer lateral consonants include the sound of WelshWelsh redirects here, and this article describes the Welsh language. For other meanings, see Wales (disambiguation). Welsh Cymraeg y Gymraeg , not to be confused with the Welsh dialect of English, is a Brythonic branch of Celtic spoken natively in the wes ll, which is a voiceless lateral fricative, and the retroflex laterals as can be found in most Hindustani languages.
Many non- Indo-European languages (e.g. in several native language families of North AmericaNorth America is the third largest continent in area and the fourth ranked in population. It is bounded on the north by the Arctic Ocean, on the east by the North Atlantic Ocean, on the south by the Caribbean Sea, and on the west by the North Pacific Ocea and aboriginal AustraliaAustralia is the sixth-largest country in the world (geographically), the only one to occupy an entire continent, and the largest in the region of Australasia. Australia includes the island of Tasmania, which is an Australian State. Its neighbouring countn ones) have whole systems of several different lateral fricatives and affricates in their consonant inventories.
List of laterals: