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Voiceless retroflex lateral fricative
ꞎ
Encoding
Entity (decimal)	Template:Infobox IPA/format numbers
Unicode (hex)	Template:Infobox IPA/format numbers
Template:Infobox IPA/format numbers

The voiceless retroflex lateral fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The IPA has no officially recognized symbol for this sound. However, in the literature the "belt" on the recognized symbol for a voiceless lateral fricative is combined with the tail of the retroflex consonants to create the ad hoc symbol ⟨ꞎ⟩.

Now that font-editing software has become accessible, well-designed glyphs for this and other non-sanctioned lateral fricatives will occasionally be seen:

File:Lateral fricatives.png

Indeed, SIL International added these symbols to the Private Use Area of their Charis and Doulos fonts, with the retroflex as U+F266. In 2008, the Unicode Technical Committee accepted this character as Template:Unichar, included in Unicode 6.0.

Features

Features of the voiceless retroflex lateral fricative:

• Its manner of articulation is fricative, which means it is produced by constricting air flow through a narrow channel at the place of articulation, causing turbulence.
• Its place of articulation is retroflex, which prototypically means it is articulated subapical (with the tip of the tongue curled up), but more generally, it means that it is postalveolar without being palatalized. That is, besides the prototypical sub-apical articulation, the tongue contact can be apical (pointed) or laminal (flat).

• It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth only.
• It is a lateral consonant, which means it is produced by directing the airstream over the sides of the tongue, rather than down the middle.
• The airstream mechanism is pulmonic, which means it is articulated by pushing air solely with the lungs and diaphragm, as in most sounds.

Occurrence

Language		IPA	Meaning	Notes
Toda		[pʏːꞎ]	'summer'

See also

• Index of phonetics articles