Retroflex lateral flap
Encyclopedia : R : RE : RET : Retroflex lateral flap
The Iwaidja language of Australia has both alveolar and retroflex lateral flaps, and perhaps a palatal lateral flap as well. (However, the latter may instead be a palatalized alveolar lateral flap.) These contrast with lateral approximants at the same positions, as well as a central retroflex flap [ɽ], alveolar trill [r], and alveolar approximant [ɹ].
In the Tamil language the retroflex lateral approximant is often realized as a flap, but this is not contrastive.
The symbol for the alveolar lateral flap is combined with the tail of the retroflex consonants to create the ad hoc symbol for the retroflex lateral flap, <ɺ̢> (here created as a digraph, with a diacritic for the tail, since there is no Unicode value for this symbol). While this is the expected symbol, it is not officially recognized by the IPA. In addition, now that font-editing software has become accessible, dedicated glyphs are sometimes created for such sounds, such as:
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.