Lateral release (phonetics)

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In phonetics, a lateral release is the release of a plosive consonant into a lateral consonant. Such sounds are transcribed in the IPA with a superscript el, for example as [dˡ]. In English words such as bottle, in which historically the tongue made separate contacts with the alveolar ridge for the /t/ and /n/ ([ˈbɒt^əl̩]), many speakers today make only one tongue contact. That is, the /t/ is laterally released directly into the /l/: [ˈbɒtˡl̩].

While this is a minor phonetic detail in English, and indeed in most languages where it occurs, lateral release is contrastive in a few cases. One of these is in Qatari Arabic, where an /l/ is reduced to lateral release after /d/, which in turn becomes laminal, as in /dlaal/ [d̻ˡaːl] 'coffee pots'.^[1]

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