Pronounce English Accurately

Video Text

/l/ is, once again, pronounced in exactly the same place as /t, d/, /s, z/ and /n/, on the alveolar ridge.

The difference this time is that unlike /n/, for which the air flows through the nasal cavity, with /l/ the nasal cavity is blocked and the air flows around the sides of the tongue.

For this reason its manner of articulation is termed 'lateral' - meaning side, as the air passage is to the sides of the tongue.

So /l/ is a voiced alveolar lateral.

The /l/ sound is a problem for quite a lot of learners, as other languages often don't have the same distinction between /l/ and /r/, making it hard to distinguish from a /r/ sound, and for some learners it is difficult to distinguish from the /n/ sound in the previous lesson.

We'll look at the /r/ sound a bit later and contrast /n, l/ and /r/ when we've done all three sounds.

/l/ is always spelt with the letter 'l' and transcribed with the letter 'l'.

Words with /l/ at the beginning:

'love'

'list'

'loop'

'lack'

'lazy'

/l/ in medial position:

'alight'

'feline'

'realise'

'relate'

'bollard'

And in final position:

'pale'

'pool'

'pull'

'mile'

'whale'

If you are a native English speaker you probably cannot notice any difference in the sound /l/ at the end of words compared to the beginning of words. the /l/ sound probably sounds exactly the same to you in 'loop' and 'pool', 'lift' and 'fill'.

But there is a phonetic difference in the way /l/ is pronounced according to where it appears in a word.

At the start of a syllable /l/ is alveolar only - the back of the tongue is low, not doing anything.

At the end of a syllable, after a vowel, the tip of the tongue is still pressed against the alveolar ridge but now the back of the tongue is raised high up near the soft palate: [lə - əɫ - lə - əɫ].

The 'postvocalic' version of /l/ is known as 'dark l' and is transcribed with the IPA symbol on the screen: [ɫ].

Remember that square brackets are used for phonetic detail and oblique slashes are for phonemic contrasts.

In 'prevocalic' position it is known as 'clear l' and its IPA symbol is the normal letter 'l'.

The reason native speakers of English cannot usually perceive the difference between 'clear l' and 'dark l' is that the difference is not contrastive - whichever way it is pronounced, it is still an /l/ phoneme so the English speaker's ear is not sensitive to the difference.

Non-native speakers may be able to perceive the difference much more clearly as they are not hearing it filtered through the sound system of English.

'Dark l' can be difficult to make if your language doesn't have it. German is an example of a language with 'clear l' only, as in Feld, 'field'.

German speakers may carry this over into English and produce a clear 'l' everywhere: [fiːlt] for [fiːɫd].

Producing a clear 'l' instead of a dark one certainly isn't the end of the world - it's not going to hamper communication in any way; it just sounds a bit foreign.

At the other end of the spectrum, some speakers overdo 'dark l' and allow it to become a [uw] sound, with lip rounding. This is common in Chinese accents, pronouncing 'bottle' as [ˈbɒtəw], 'metal' as [ˈmetə w] and so on.

In my view, an overdone dark 'l' is possibly worse than a clear 'l' in these positions, because it is exactly what small native-speaker children do, so it sounds childish.

If you find that you produce a [uw] sound with lip rounding where there should be a 'dark l', then I advise you to practice making an /l/ sound there and making sure it is primarily alveolar in place of articulation: /ˈmetəl/, /ˈbɒtəl/.

In words with /tn/ together like 'bottle, metal, rattle', and 'kettle', a trick to sounding native-like is to give a noisy lateral release to the /t/: 'bottle, metal, rattle', and 'kettle', not a cleanly released /t/ as in 'bottom, meter, ratty', and 'cotton'.

According to your first language, /l/ and /r/ can be particularly difficult in consonant clusters, especially with 'b', but I'll look at consonant clusters in a section of their own later.

Practice sentences:

Long-legged lemurs slumbered lazily on lichen-covered logs.

Luckily all leopards love loping slowly through leaves.

Pull all the loops lightly until they lock the full length of the cable.