L

12th letter of the English alphabet. Its sound is a voiced alveolar lateral, though in some languages it tends to be dropped between a back vowel and a consonant, as in English ‘half’ and ‘should’.

In most forms of spoken English the phoneme /l/ has two allophones: clear, as in ‘lip’, and dark, as in ‘fill’. In Cockney and other local accents, dark /l/ is often vocalized, that is, becoming a sound like /w/. Though consonantal, English /l/ is sometimes syllabic, as in ‘middle’. It is voiced, except initially after /p/ and /k/, as in ‘please’ and ‘clean’. An unvoiced use of l, as an alveolar lateral fricative, is found in Welsh, written ll, as in ‘Llanelli’.