The voiceless palatal lateral fricative is a type of
consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced wit ...
al sound, used in a few
spoken language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of met ...
s.
This sound is somewhat rare;
Dahalo
Dahalo is an endangered Cushitic language spoken by at most 400 Dahalo people on the coast of Kenya, near the mouth of the Tana River. Dahalo is unusual among the world's languages in using all four airstream mechanisms found in human language ...
has both a palatal lateral fricative and an
affricate
An affricate is a consonant that begins as a stop and releases as a fricative, generally with the same place of articulation (most often coronal). It is often difficult to decide if a stop and fricative form a single phoneme or a consonant pair. ...
;
Hadza has a series of affricates. In
Bura, it is the realization of palatalized and contrasts with .
The IPA proper has no dedicated symbol for this sound. The devoicing and raising diacritics may be used to transcribe it: . However, the
extIPA
The Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for Disordered Speech, commonly abbreviated extIPA , are a set of letters and diacritics devised by the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association to augment the Internatio ...
has the expected letter :
was added to Unicode in 2021.
If distinction is necessary, the voiceless alveolo-palatal lateral fricative may be transcribed as (
retracted and
palatalized ) or (devoiced,
advanced and
raised ); these are essentially equivalent, since the contact includes both the blade and body (but not the tip) of the tongue. The equivalent X-SAMPA symbols are
K_-_j or
K_-' and
L_0_+_r, respectively. A non-IPA letter (devoiced and raised can be used, which is an ordinary "l", plus the curl found in the symbols for alveolo-palatal sibilant fricatives ).
Some scholars also posit the voiceless palatal lateral approximant distinct from the fricative. The approximant may be represented in the IPA as .
Features
Features of the voiceless palatal lateral fricative:
Occurrence
Notes
References
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See also
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Index of phonetics articles
A
* Acoustic phonetics
* Active articulator
* Affricate
* Airstream mechanism
* Alexander John Ellis
* Alexander Melville Bell
* Alfred C. Gimson
* Allophone
* Alveolar approximant ()
* Alveolar click ()
* Alveolar consonant
* Alveolar ejecti ...
External links
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{{IPA navigation
Lateral consonants
Pulmonic consonants
Voiceless oral consonants
Palatal consonants