Laterals

Lateral approximants, more frequently called just ‘laterals’, occur in English. Laterals are represented in English orthography with the letter . Phonetically they are very variable sounds both for individual speakers and across varieties of English.

Laterals are made with a complete closure of the tongue front (either the tip or the blade) against the alveolar ridge, which makes this part of the tongue gesture the same as that for [t d n]. But for laterals, one or both sides of the tongue is kept down, allowing air to escape. If you say the word ‘leaf ’, and isolate the first consonantal sound, then suck air in, you should feel that one or both sides of the mouth go cold and dry. Just as some people are left-handed and some are right-handed (and some are ambidextrous), so some predominantly produce laterals with one or the other side of their tongue.

Lateral approximants are a little different from the other approximants in terms of their overall gesture: they do not have a stricture of open approximation. On the other hand, the acoustic effect of open approximation is that it produces frictionless airflow, and laterals in English do not have friction, so they are classified as approximants.

Laterals vary in several ways: voicing, place of articulation, secondary articulation and syllabicity. We will look these features one by one.