Voiced dental and alveolar lateral flaps
| Voiced alveolar lateral flap | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| ɺ | |||
| IPA number | 181 | ||
| Audio sample | |||
|
source · help | |||
| Encoding | |||
| Entity (decimal) | ɺ | ||
| Unicode (hex) | U+027A | ||
| X-SAMPA | l\ | ||
| Braille | |||
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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.