Ll

This article is about a digraph. For LL as an acronym, see LL.

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

Spanish and Galician

In Spanish and official Galician spelling the ll combination stands for the phoneme /ʎ/ (palatal lateral approximant, a palatal /l/). However, nowadays most Spanish speakers, as well as some Galicians, pronounce ll the same as y (yeísmo). As a result, in most parts of Latin America as well as in many regions of Spain, Spanish speakers pronounce it /ʝ/ (voiced palatal fricative), while some other Latin Americans (especially Rioplatense speakers, and in Tabasco, Mexico) pronounce it /ʒ/ (voiced postalveolar fricative) or /ʃ/ (voiceless postalveolar fricative).

This digraph is considered a single letter in Spanish orthography, called elle. From 1803 was collated after L as a separate entry, but this is no longer done: in April of 1994, a votation in the X Congress of the Association of Spanish Language Academies ruled the adoption of the standard Latin alphabet collation rules, so that for purposes of collation the digraph ll is now considered a sequence of two characters. The same is now true of the Spanish-language digraph, ch. Hypercorrection leads some to wrongly capitalize it as a single letter (*"LLosa" instead of the official "Llosa"; "LLOSA" is the right form in full uppercase) as with the Dutch IJ. 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.

Catalan

In Catalan, ll represents the phoneme /ʎ/ (palatal lateral approximant. For example, as in llengua "language" or "tongue", enllaç "linkage", "connection" or coltell "knife". In order not to confound ll with a geminate l /ll/, the ligature l·l is used with the second meaning. For example, excel·lent is the Catalan word for "excellent". See interpunct for more information.

Philippine languages

While Philippine languages like Tagalog and Ilokano write ly or li in the spelling of Spanish loanwords, ll still survives in proper nouns. However, the pronunciation of ll is simply [lj] rather than [ʎ]. Hence the surnames Padilla and Villanueva are respectively pronounced [pɐˈdɪːlja] and [ˌbɪːljanuˈwɛːba].

Furthermore, in Ilokano ll represents a geminate alveolar lateral approximant /lː/, like in Italian.

Latin and Italian

In Latin, as well as in Italian, the digraph ll represents a geminate alveolar lateral approximant /lː/; e.g., fratello /fraˈtɛlːo/.

Albanian

In Albanian, L stands, as in Spanish, for the sound /l/, while Ll is pronounced as the velarized sound /ɫ/.

Welsh

In Welsh, Ll stands for a voiceless lateral fricative sound, found also in Navajo, where it is written as ł. The IPA signifies this sound as l with belt (ɬ). This sound is very common in place names in Wales because it occurs in the word Llan, meaning "church of Saint ...", for example. Llanelli where it appears twice, or "Llanrwst", which means "church of Saint Gwrwst." These Welsh placenames are therefore very often mispronounced by English speakers, especially those from outside the British Isles, but also many Britons. The sound is approximately "khl", where "kh" is as the "ch" in "loch" or a Spanish j.

See also

• Lh (digraph)
• Lj (digraph)
• Hungarian ly