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)

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).