A voiceless palatal lateral fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in a few spokenlanguages. This sound is somewhat rare; Dahalo has both a palatal lateral fricative and an affricate; Hadza has a series of palatal lateral affricates. In Bura, it is the realization of palatalized /ɬʲ/ and contrasts with [ʎ].
The extensions to the IPA transcribes this sound with the letter ⟨𝼆⟩ (⟨ʎ⟩ with a belt, analogous to ⟨ɬ⟩ for the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative), which was added to Unicode in 2021. Some scholars also posit a voiceless palatal lateral approximant distinct from the fricative. The approximant may be represented in the IPA as ⟨ʎ̥⟩.
If distinction is necessary, a voiceless alveolo-palatal lateral fricative may be transcribed as ⟨ɬ̠ʲ⟩ (retracted and palatalized⟨ɬ⟩) or as advanced ⟨𝼆̟⟩; these are essentially equivalent. The approximant also occurs and can be represented as ⟨l̠̊ʲ⟩ or ⟨ʎ̥˖⟩.
Features of the voiceless palatal lateral fricative:
Its manner of articulation is fricative, which means it is produced by constricting air flow through a narrow channel at the place of articulation, causing turbulence.
Voiceless post-palatal or pre-velar lateral fricative
𝼆̠
𝼄̟
Archi, a Northeast Caucasian language of Dagestan, has four voiceless palatal lateral fricatives: plain [𝼆], labialized[𝼆ʷ], fortis[𝼆ː], and labialized fortis [𝼆ːʷ]. Although clearly fricatives, these are further back than palatals in most languages, but further forward than velars in most languages, and might better be called post-palatal or pre-velar. Archi also has a voiced fricative, as well as a voiceless and several ejective lateral velar affricates, but no alveolar lateral fricatives or affricates.[12]
↑An example of a scholar disagreeing with this position is Scholtz (2009). On page 15, she provides a phoneme chart for Trøndersk, in which /ʎ/ is included. Under the phoneme chart she writes "Vanvik also lists /ʎ̥/ as an underlying phoneme, but that’s ridiculous." She provides no further explanation for that.
