The voiced palatal lateral flap is a rare type of

consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...

al sound, used in some spoken

language Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing syste ...

s. There is no dedicated symbol in the

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standard written representation ...

that represents this sound. However, the symbol for a

palatal lateral approximant The voiced palatal lateral approximant is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , a rotated lowercase letter , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbo ...

with a

breve A breve ( , less often , grammatical gender, neuter form of the Latin "short, brief") is the diacritic mark , shaped like the bottom half of a circle. As used in Ancient Greek, it is also called , . It resembles the caron (, the wedge or in ...

denoting

extra-short The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) uses a breve to indicate a speech sound (usually a vowel) with extra-short Vowel length, duration. That is, is a very short vowel with the quality of . An example from English is the short schwa of the ...

may be used.

Features

Features of the voiced palatal lateral flap:

Occurrence

The Iwaidja and Ilgar languages of Australia have a palatal lateral flap as well as alveolar and

retroflex lateral flap The voiced retroflex lateral flap is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The "implicit" symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet is .The substitution may be used when cannot be displayed properly. The two are not c ...

s. However, the palatal flap has not been shown to be

phonemic A phoneme () is any set of similar speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages con ...

; it may instead be an underlying sequence .

References

{{IPA navigation Lateral consonants Palatal consonants Tap and flap consonants Pulmonic consonants Voiced oral consonants