I'd like to know if there's a symbol in IPA for the sound some (especially Southern, ie. round where I live) English people make when pronouncing the 'll' in words such as 'call' and 'all right' or just the 'l' in 'cool'.

Instead of pronouncing the full 'l' as you would in 'lazy', the tongue doesn't touch the alveolar ridge but goes about half way. The resulting sound is a bit like a 'w', or at least the lips are rounded like they are when pronouncing a 'w'.

People who live in or around London should know what I'm talking about.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: anycon,

It sounds like you are describing some sort of flap.

My term isn't professional, but I'd call it a "soft l." I remember when I studied Spanish, they have a "soft d," where it is between the sound of the d and the th.

The London sound is variously notated. Professor Wells of UCL, whose analyses are a sort of de facto standard, treats it as a vowel and notates it with [o]. So [fIo] 'fill', ['mIdo] 'middle', etc.

One of his colleagues however writes it as [w]. It might not be exactly the same as the syllable-initial [w] in [wet], but they don't contrast: the [w] that was formerly an [l] only occurs syllable-finally, so it's legitimate to regard them as both varieties of a phoneme /w/.

I don't use the sound myself, I'm old-fashioned and still use a back [l] (X-SAMPA symbol [5]), but from what I can hear the precise quality tends to be a mid-close rounded neutral vowel, IPA symbol barred-o, X-SAMPA [8].

Thank you aput. Yes it occurs to me that the sound in 'call' or 'hall' could plausibly be notated as [ɔːw]. Not sure about [ɔːo].

And I found this on Wikipedia. Is it relevant?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: anycon,

For me it's a distinct but lazy sound - as for 'l' but you can only be halfway bothered. I heard a German pronounce Beograd recently, as noted in the article anycon recommends, and the sound she made before the final syllable was just barely an 'l' and similar to how I'd pronounce the 'll' in "call". I guess I say it's somewhere between /kɔː/ and /kɔːl/. Furthermore - and this is most likely to happen when I'm drunk - I'll sometimes roll a double-l in the last syllable if there's another word to come.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: braket,