A voiced alveolar lateral fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages.

Notation

thumb|upright=0.5|Former style of the IPA letter for a voiced alveolar lateral fricative|class=skin-invert-image

The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents voiced dental, alveolar, and postalveolar lateral fricatives is , sometimes referred to as lezh.

In 1938, a symbol shaped similarly to heng was approved as the official IPA symbol for the voiced alveolar lateral fricative, replacing . It was suggested at the same time, however, that a compromise shaped like something between the two may also be used at the author's discretion. It was this compromise version, , that was included in the 1949 Principles of the International Phonetic Association and the subsequent IPA charts, until it was replaced again by at the 1989 Kiel Convention. Despite the Association's prescription, is nonetheless seen in literature from the 1960s to the 1980s.

There are several Unicode characters based on lezh (ɮ):

  • is a superscript IPA letter
  • is a superscript IPA letter

Features

Features of a voiced alveolar lateral fricative:

Occurrence

Dental or denti-alveolar

{| class="wikitable"

! colspan="2" | Language

! Word

! IPA

! Meaning

! Notes

|-

| Amis

| Kangko

|

|

| 'enemy'

| May be realized as denti-alveolar or interdental . Corresponds to in the Fengpin dialect.<!-- [ð̪] may seem redundant, as [ð] is already dental, but this is the transcription used by the authors. They likely are using it to refer to interdental articulation, but they never explicitly mention this; they only do so for the lateral fricative here. -->

|}

Alveolar

{| class="wikitable"

! colspan="2" | Language

! Word

! IPA

! Meaning

! Notes

|-

| colspan="2" | Adyghe

|

|

| 'town'

| Can also be pronounced as

|-

| colspan="2" | Bura

|

|

|'cloud'

| Contrasts with and .

|-

| English

| South African

| ibandla

|

| 'meeting of a Nguni chief or community'

| Only found in Zulu loan words in South African English.

|-

| colspan="2" |Kabalan

|

|

|'sky'

|

|-

| colspan="2" | Kabardian

|

|

| 'seven'

| Can also be pronounced as

|-

| colspan="2" | Ket

|

|

| 'nose'

| Can also be pronounced as

|-

| colspan="2" | Moloko

|

|

| 'start, begin'

| Contrasts with , and

|-

| colspan="2" | Mongolian

|

|

| 'stone'

| Devoiced to at the end of a word or when surrounded by voiceless consonants

|-

| colspan="2" |Pinuyumayan

|

|

|'tooth'

|Puyuma dialect doesn't have the sound.

|-

| colspan="2" | Sassarese

|

|

| 'hot'

|

|-

| colspan="2" | Tera

|

|

| 'planting'

| Contrasts with both and

|-

| colspan="2" |Truku

|

|

|'clothes'

|

|-

| colspan="2" | Zulu

|

|

| 'to eat'

| Contrasts with both and ; realized as after nasals

|}

Voiced lateral-median fricative

The voiced alveolar lateral–median fricative (also known as a "lisp" fricative) is a consonantal sound pronounced with simultaneous lateral and central airflow.

Features

However, it does not have the grooved tongue and directed airflow, or the high frequencies, of a sibilant.

Occurrence

{| class="wikitable"

! colspan="2" |Language !! Word !! IPA !! Meaning !! Notes

|-

| Arabic

| Rijal Almaʽa

|

|

| 'hyena'

| Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic

|-

|colspan=2| Mehri