Ll - Spanish and Galician

Spanish and Galician

Digraph considered since 1803 to be the fourteenth letter of the Spanish alphabet because of its representation of a palatal lateral articulation consonant phoneme. In great part of the Hispanic countries and regions it is pronounced as a "y", with central emission of air, and with the same variations of articulation. (definition by The Royal Academy of Spanish Language)

/ʎ/ ʎ Sorry, your browser either has JavaScript disabled or does not have any supported player.
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In 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 was considered a single letter in Spanish orthography, called elle. From 1803 it was collated after L as a separate entry, a practice now abandoned: in April 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).