A voiced alveolar lateral flap is a type of consonantal sound, found in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , a fusion of a rotated lowercase letter with a letter . Approved in 1928, the symbol represented a sound intermediate between and or between and until 1979, when its value was redefined as an alveolar lateral flap.
Some languages that are described as having a lateral flap actually have a flap that is indeterminate with respect to centrality, and may surface as either central or lateral, either in free variation or allophonically depending on surrounding vowels and consonants.
Additionally, some languages have a voiced postalveolar lateral flap, which can be transcribed in the IPA with the retracted diacritic, such as .
Features
Features of a voiced alveolar lateral flap:
Occurrence
Alveolar
{| class="wikitable"
! colspan=2|Language
! Word
! IPA
! Meaning
! Notes
|-
| colspan=2|Baniwa
|
|
|'ember'
|Varies a median flap, but is lateral in careful pronunciation.
|-
|colspan=2| Chaga (Vunjo dialect)
|
|
| 'to dress oneself'
| Contrasts with
|-
| colspan=2|Iwaidja
|ayanjildin
|align=center|
|'sweetheart'
| Contrasts and possibly .
|-
| rowspan="2" colspan=2 | Japanese
| roku
|align=center|
| 'six'
| rowspan=2|Allophonically . See Japanese phonology
|-
| kokoro
|align=center|
| 'heart'
|-
| colspan=2|Kasua
|
|align=center|
| 'heavy'
| Never used at the beginning nor the end of a word.
|
|align=center|
| 'Yalë'
| In free variation with ; written as or .
|}
Postalveolar
{| class="wikitable"
! colspan=2|Language
! Word
! IPA
! Meaning
! Notes
|-
| colspan=2|Amis ||
| ||'fog'||Has a vowel-like release when word final.
|-
| Norwegian
| Trøndersk
|
|
| 'glass'
| Also described as central . See Norwegian phonology
|}
See also
- Index of phonetics articles
- Perception of English /r/ and /l/ by Japanese speakers