Voiced dental and alveolar lateral flaps

Voiced alveolar lateral flap
ɺ
IPA number181
Audio sample
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Encoding
Entity (decimal)ɺ
Unicode (hex)U+027A
X-SAMPAl\
Braille

The voiced alveolar lateral flap is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ɺ, a fusion of a rotated lowercase letter r with a letter l. Approved in 1928, the symbol represented a sound intermediate between [d] and [l] or between [r] and [l] 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.