Voiceless dental and alveolar lateral fricatives

The voiceless alveolar lateral fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents voiceless dental, alveolar, and postalveolar lateral fricatives is [ɬ], and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is . The symbol [ɬ] is called "belted l" and should not be confused with "l with tilde", [ɫ], which transcribes a different sound, the velarized alveolar lateral approximant. It should also be distinguished from a voiceless alveolar lateral approximant, although the fricative is sometimes incorrectly described as a "voiceless l", a description fitting only of the approximant.

Several Welsh names beginning with this sound (e.g. Llwyd /ɬʊɨd/, Llywelyn /ɬəˈwɛlɨn/) have been borrowed into English, where they either retain the Welsh ⟨ll⟩ spelling but are pronounced with an /l/ (Lloyd, Llewellyn), or are substituted with ⟨fl⟩ (pronounced /fl/) (Floyd, Fluellen).

Features[edit]
Features of the voiceless alveolar 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 alveolar, which means it is articulated with either the tip or the blade of the tongue at the alveolar ridge, termed respectively apical and laminal.
 * Its phonation is voiceless, which means it is produced without vibrations of the vocal cords. In some languages the vocal cords are actively separated, so it is always voiceless; in others the cords are lax, so that it may take on the voicing of adjacent sounds.
 * It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth only.
 * It is a lateral consonant, which means it is produced by directing the airstream over the sides of the tongue, rather than down the middle.
 * The airstream mechanism is pulmonic, which means it is articulated by pushing air solely with the lungs and diaphragm, as in most sounds.

Occurrence[edit]
Although the sound is rare among European languages outside the Caucasus (being found notably in Welsh, where it is written ⟨ll⟩), it is fairly common among indigenous languages of the Americas such as Nahuatl, Navajo, and North Caucasian languages, such as Avar. It is also found in African languages like Zulu, Asian languages like Chukchi and some Yue dialects like Taishanese, and several Formosan languages and a number of dialects in Taiwan.

Semitic languages
The sound is conjectured as a phoneme for Proto-Semitic language, usually transcribed as ś; it has evolved into Arabic [ʃ], Hebrew [s]:

Amongst Semitic languages, the sound still exists in contemporary Soqotri and Mehri. In Ge'ez, it is written with the letter Śawt.