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Ll


Ll/ll is a digraph which occurs in several natural languages.

Spain

In Spanish and Catalan, the Ll combination stands for the sound (a palatal /l/). In Spanish it is pronounced /j/ in many regions, or more rarely /ʒ/.

It was considered a single letter in Spanish orthography, and was collated after 'l' as a separate entry.

In handwriting it is written as a ligature of two L's, with a distinct uppercase and lowercase form. An old ligature for Ll is known as the 'broken l', which takes the form of a lowercase 'l' with the top half shifted to the left, connected to the lower half with a thin horizontal stroke. This ligature is not encoded by any standard character encoding and therefore cannot be used in digitized documents.

Albania

In Albanian, the position is the reverse of Spanish, with an Albanian written Ll having a standard /l/ sound, while an Albanian written L is liquid.

Other uses

In Welsh, Ll stands for a voiceless lateral fricative sound, found also in Navajo, where it is written as Łł. The IPA signifies this sound as l with belt (ɬ). This sound is very common in British place names because it occurs in the word Llan, a church, and Welsh placenames are therefore very often mispronounced by English speakers, especially those from outside the British Isles.

Last updated: 07-29-2005 20:38:40
Last updated: 08-16-2005 07:16:35