Voicing

Laterals are generally voiced throughout, i.e. they are accompanied by vocal fold vibration: the laterals in ‘loose’ (a simple syllable initial), ‘hollow’ (between vowels after a stressed syllable), ‘allow’ (between vowels before a stressed syllable) and ‘fall’ (syllable final) are all fully voiced.

Laterals may be produced with voicelessness. This happens after voiceless plosives in a cluster syllable-initially, as in ‘play’, ‘plum’, ‘clay’, ‘clunk’. The combination of voicelessness + laterality without friction has no IPA symbol of its own, so a composite one has to be made from a lateral approximant symbol together with a diacritic for voicelessness: . This is how clusters such as those we have just mentioned are usually transcribed: ‘ay’, ‘ay’, etc. As with [j] and [w], it is hard to produce frictionless sounds in combination with voicelessness, so these sounds typically have some degree of friction.