Ll

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

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

In English

In English, ll represents the same sound as single l: /l/. The doubling is used to indicate that the preceding vowel is (historically) short, or for etymological reasons, in latinisms.

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 done: in April of 1994, a vote 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 encoded in Unicode at U+A746 (uppercase) and U+A747 (lowercase).

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 confuse 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.

Albanian

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

Welsh

The "ll" ligature formerly used in Welsh transliteration: Unicode U+1EFA and U+1EFB.

In Welsh and Central Alaskan Yup'ik, ll stands for a voiceless lateral fricative sound. 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 Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyllllantysiliogogogoch. These Welsh placenames therefore very often bear simplified pronunciations in English (generally the ll sound being replaced by chl (the ch pronounced as in loch)). In dictionaries, LL is treated as a separate letter from L (e.g. lwc sorts before llaw).

Other

In the Gwoyeu Romatzyh romanization of Mandarin Chinese, final -ll indicates a falling tone on a syllable ending in /ɻ/, which is otherwise spelled -l.

See also

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