Voiceless retroflex lateral fricative

The voiceless retroflex lateral fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The IPA has no officially recognized symbol for this sound. However, in the literature the "belt" on the recognized symbol for a voiceless lateral fricative is combined with the tail of the retroflex consonants to create the "ad hoc" symbol <IPA|ɬ̢> (here created as a digraph, with a diacritic for the tail, since Unicode will not support this symbol until version 7.0).

Now that font-editing software has become accessible, well designed glyphs for this and other non-sanctioned lateral fricatives will occasionally be seen:

Indeed, SIL International has added these symbols to the Private Use Areas of their Charis and Doulos fonts, as U+F266 (). Unicode has accepted the first for its 7.0 release.

Features

Features of the voiceless retroflex lateral fricative:

* Its manner of articulation is fricative, which means it is produced by constricting air flow through a narrow channel at the place of articulation, causing turbulence.
*Its place of articulation is retroflex, which prototypically means it is articulated with the tip of the tongue curled up, but more generally means that it is postalveolar without being palatalized. That is, besides the prototypical sub-apical (curled) articulation, the tongue contact can be apical (pointed) or laminal (flat).
* Its phonation type is voiceless, which means it is produced without vibrations of the vocal cords.
* It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth.
* It is a lateral consonant, which means it is produced by allowing the airstream to flow over the sides of the tongue, rather than the middle of the tongue.
* The airstream mechanism is pulmonic egressive, which means it is articulated by pushing air out of the lungs and through the vocal tract, rather than from the glottis or the mouth.

Occurrence

ee also

*List of phonetics topics