El (Л л; italics: ''Л'' ''л'') is a letter of the

Cyrillic script The Cyrillic script ( ), Slavonic script or the Slavic script, is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking cou ...

. El commonly represents the

alveolar lateral approximant The voiced alveolar lateral approximant is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents dental, alveolar, and postalveolar lateral approximants is , and the e ...

. In

Slavic languages The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavs, Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic language, Proto ...

it may be either palatalized or slightly velarized; see

below Below may refer to: *Earth * Ground (disambiguation) * Soil * Floor * Bottom (disambiguation) * Less than *Temperatures below freezing * Hell or underworld People with the surname * Ernst von Below (1863–1955), German World War I general * Fr ...

Allography

In some

typeface A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are thousands ...

s the Cyrillic letter El has a grapheme which may be confused with the Cyrillic letter Pe (Пп)''.'' Note that Pe has a straight left leg, without the hook. An alternative form of El (Ʌ ʌ) is more common in Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Serbian.

History

The Cyrillic letter El was derived from the Greek letter lambda (Λ λ). In the

Early Cyrillic alphabet The Early Cyrillic alphabet, also called classical Cyrillic or paleo-Cyrillic, is a writing system that was developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the late 9th century on the basis of the Greek alphabet for the Slavic people livin ...

its name was (''ljudije''), 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: *

, like the pronunciation of in "lip" * palatalized

velarized alveolar lateral approximant The voiced alveolar lateral approximant is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents dental, alveolar, and postalveolar lateral approximants is , and the e ...

, like the pronunciation of in "bell" and "milk" *

Labiovelar approximant Labiovelar consonant may refer to: * Labial–velar consonant such as (a consonant made at two places of articulation, one at the lips and the other at the soft palate) * Labialized velar consonant such as or (a consonant with an approximant-li ...

, like the in "water" *

voiced alveolar lateral fricative The voiced alveolar lateral fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents voiced dental, alveolar, and postalveolar lateral fricatives is (sometime ...

and its palatalized equivalent The phoneme in Slavic languages has two realizations: hard (, , or , exact pronunciation varies) and soft (pronounced as ) – see

palatalization Palatalization may refer to: *Palatalization (phonetics), the phonetic feature of palatal secondary articulation *Palatalization (sound change) Palatalization is a historical-linguistic sound change that results in a palatalized articulation ...

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 The soft sign (Ь, ь, italics ) also known as the front yer, front jer, or er malak (lit. "small er") is a letter of the Cyrillic script. In Old Church Slavonic, it represented a short (or "reduced") front vowel. As with its companion, the b ...

(Ь). In these languages, denotes only hard . Pronunciation of hard is sometimes given as , but it is always more velar than in

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German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ger ...

. 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. In addition, л was formerly used in Chukchi to represent the

voiceless alveolar lateral fricative 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 , ...

but has since been replaced by ԓ.

Related letters and other similar characters

*Λ λ : Greek letter Lambda *Љ љ : Cyrillic letter Lje *Ӆ ӆ : Cyrillic letter El with tail *Ԓ ԓ : Cyrillic letter El with hook *Ԯ ԯ : Cyrillic letter El with descender *L l : Latin letter L *Ł ł : Latin letter L with stroke

Allography

History

Pronunciation

Related letters and other similar characters

Computing codes

External links

References