Voiced retroflex lateral flap


The voiced retroflex lateral flap is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. It has no dedicated symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet, but may be represented as, or with a retroflex tail, ⟨Charis SIL, Doulos SIL, serif">⟩.

Features

Features of the voiced retroflex lateral flap:

Occurrence

A retroflex lateral flap has been reported from various languages of Sulawesi such as the Sangiric languages, Buol and Totoli, as well as Nambikwara in Brazil, Gaagudju in Australia, Purépecha and Western Rarámuri in Mexico, Moro in Sudan, O'odham and Mohawk in the United States, Chaga in Tanzania, and Kanuri in Nigeria.
Various Dravidian and Indic languages of India are reported to have a retroflex lateral flap, either phonemically or phonetically, including Gujarati, Konkani, Marathi, Odia, and Rajasthani. Masica describes the sound as widespread in the Indic languages of India:

Dedicated symbol

There is no official IPA symbol for the retroflex lateral flap. However, an ad hoc symbol may be created by combining the symbol for the alveolar lateral flap with the tail of the retroflex consonants,
This was only accepted by Unicode in 2020, and so for now normal typography requires the use of a combining diacritic,. SIL International includes this symbol to the Private Use Areas of their Gentium Plus, Charis, and Doulos fonts, as U+F269.