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Lateral consonant

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Template:Short description Template:More citations needed Template:Multiple image A lateral is a consonant in which the airstream proceeds along one or both of the sides of the tongue, but it is blocked by the tongue from going through the middle of the mouth. An example of a lateral consonant is the English L, as in Larry. Lateral consonants contrast with central consonants, in which the airstream flows through the center of the mouth.

For the most common laterals, the tip of the tongue makes contact with the upper teeth (see dental consonant) or the upper gum (see alveolar consonant), but there are many other possible places for laterals to be made. The most common laterals are approximants and belong to the class of liquids, but lateral fricatives and affricates are also common in some parts of the world. Some languages, such as the Iwaidja and Ilgar languages of Australia, have lateral flaps, and others, such as the Xhosa and Zulu languages of Africa, have lateral clicks.

When pronouncing the labiodental fricatives Template:IPA, the lip blocks the airflow in the centre of the vocal tract, so the airstream proceeds along the sides instead. Nevertheless, they are not considered lateral consonants because the airflow never goes over the side of the tongue. No known language makes a distinction between lateral and non-lateral labiodentals. Plosives are never lateral, but they may have lateral release. Nasals are almost never lateral either, but reported in Nzema, and some languages have lateral nasal clicks. For consonants articulated in the throat (laryngeals), the lateral distinction is not made by any language, although pharyngeal and epiglottal laterals are reportedly possible.Template:Sfnp

Examples

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English has one lateral phoneme: the lateral approximant Template:IPA, which in many accents has two allophones. One, found before vowels (and /j/) as in lady or fly (or value), is called clear l, pronounced as the alveolar lateral approximant Template:IPA 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 as the uvularized alveolar lateral approximant Template:IPA with the tongue assuming a spoon-like shape with its back part raised, which gives the sound a Template:IPA- or Template:IPA-like resonance. In some languages, like Albanian, those two sounds are different phonemes. Malsia e Madhe Gheg Albanian and Salamina Arvanitika even have the three-way distinction of laterals Template:IPA, Template:IPA and Template:IPA.<ref>Template:Cite journal.</ref> East Slavic languages contrast Template:IPA and Template:IPA but do not have [l].

In many British accents (e.g. Cockney), dark Template:IPA may undergo vocalization through the reduction and loss of contact between the tip of the tongue and the alveolar ridge, becoming a rounded back vowel or glide. This process turns tell into Template:IPA, as must have happened with talk Template:IPA or walk Template:IPA at some stage. A similar process happened during the development of many other languages, including Brazilian Portuguese, Old French, and Polish, in all three of these resulting in voiced velar approximant Template:IPA or voiced labio-velar approximant Template:IPA, whence Modern French sauce as compared with Spanish salsa, or Polish Wisła (pronounced Template:IPA) as compared with English Vistula.

In central and Venice dialects of Venetian, intervocalic Template:IPA has turned into a semivocalic Template:IPA, so that the written word ła bała is pronounced Template:IPA. The orthography uses the letter ł to represent this phoneme (it specifically represents not the Template:IPA sound but the phoneme that is, in some dialects, Template:IPA and, in others, Template:IPA).

Many aboriginal Australian languages have a series of three or four lateral approximants, as do various dialects of Irish. Rarer lateral consonants include the retroflex laterals that can be found in many languages of IndiaTemplate:Citation needed and in some Swedish dialects, and the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative Template:IPA, found in many Native North American languages, Welsh and Zulu. In Adyghe and some Athabaskan languages like Hän, both voiceless and voiced alveolar lateral fricatives occur, but there is no approximant. Many of these languages also have lateral affricates. Some languages have palatal or velar voiceless lateral fricatives or affricates, such as Dahalo and Zulu, but the IPA has no symbols for such sounds. However, appropriate symbols are easy to make by adding a lateral-fricative belt to the symbol for the corresponding lateral approximant (see below). Also, a devoicing diacritic may be added to the approximant.

File:Lateral fricatives.svg
Lateral fricative letters

Nearly all languages with such lateral obstruents also have the approximant. However, there are a number of exceptions, many of them located in the Pacific Northwest area of the United States. For example, Tlingit has Template:IPA but no Template:IPA.Template:Efn Other examples from the same area include Nuu-chah-nulth and Kutenai, and elsewhere, Mongolian, Chukchi, and Kabardian.

Standard Tibetan has a voiceless lateral approximant, usually romanized as lh, as in the name Lhasa.

A uvular lateral approximant has been reported to occur in some speakers of American English.Template:Sfnp

Pashto has a retroflex lateral flap that becomes voiced retroflex approximant when it is at the end of a syllable and a word.Template:Citation needed

There are a large number of lateral click consonants; 17 occur in !Xóõ.

Lateral trills are also possible, but they do not occur in any known language. They may be pronounced by initiating Template:IPA or Template:IPA with an especially forceful airflow. There is no symbol for them in the IPA. They are sometimes used to imitate bird calls, and they are a component of Donald Duck talk.

List of laterals

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Approximants

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Fricatives

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Only the alveolar lateral fricatives have dedicated letters in the IPA proper, though the retroflex letters are 'implied'. The others are provided by the extIPA.

Affricates

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Flaps

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Ejective

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Affricates

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Fricatives

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Clicks

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Ambiguous centrality

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The IPA requires sounds to be defined as to centrality, as either central or lateral. However, languages may be ambiguous as to some consonants' laterality.Template:Sfn A well-known example is the liquid consonant in Japanese, represented in common transliteration systems as Template:Angle brackets, which can be recognized as a (post)alveolar tap Template:IPA,<ref name="ipajp">Okada, Hideo (1999), "Japanese", in International Phonetic Association, Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A Guide to the Use of the International Phonetic Alphabet, Cambridge University Press, pp. 117–119, Template:Isbn.</ref> alveolar lateral flap /ɺ/, (post)alveolar lateral approximant /l/, (post)alveolar approximant /ɹ/,<ref name="ipajp"/> voiced retroflex stop /ɖ/,<ref>Arai, Takayuki; Warner, Natasha; Greenberg, Steven (2007), "Analysis of spontaneous Japanese in a multi-language telephone-speech corpus", Acoustical Science and Technology, 28 (1): 46–48, Template:Doi</ref> and various less common forms.

Lateralized consonants

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A superscript Template:Angbr IPA is defined as lateral release.

Consonants may also be pronounced with simultaneous lateral and central airflow. This is well-known from speech pathology with a lateral lisp. However, it also occurs in nondisordered speech in some southern Arabic dialects and possibly some Modern South Arabian languages, which have pharyngealized nonsibilant Template:IPA and Template:IPA (simultaneous Template:IPA and Template:IPA) and possibly a sibilant Template:IPA (simultaneous Template:IPA). Examples are Template:IPA 'pain' in the dialect of Al-Rubūʽah and Template:IPA 'back' and Template:IPA 'hyena' in [[Rijal AlmaTemplate:Ayina]].<ref>Heselwood (2013) Phonetic transcription in theory and practice, p 122–123</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> (Here the Template:Angbr IPA indicates simultaneous laterality rather than lateral release.) Biblical Hebrew may have had non-emphatic central-lateral sibilants Template:IPA and Template:IPA, while Old Arabic has been analyzed as having the emphatic central–lateral fricatives Template:IPA, Template:IPA and Template:IPA.<ref>Potet (2013) Arabic and Persian Loanwords in Tagalog, p. 89 ff.</ref>

See also

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Notes

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References

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Sources

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