Place of articulation

For English laterals the active articulator is the tongue tip or the tongue blade, which makes a closure at the alveolar ridge.

Laterals are produced with a dental place of articulation when the next sound is also dental. Laterals combined with [θ] regularly have a dental articulation: ‘heath’, ‘weath’, ‘stea’. Across word boundaries, too, laterals can be produced with a dental place of articulation as in ‘all the people’, .

There is another variant of [l] which it is a bit counterintuitive to call ‘lateral’, because it has no lateral airflow; but it turns up as a variant of [l], so it makes sense to think of it as belonging in the same family of sounds, i.e. as an allophone of /l/. Many varieties of English, including many southern Anglo-English, African American, Scottish and Australian ones, use a vocalic articulation for laterals which involves no constriction of the front part of the tongue at all. For example, a word like ‘hill’ can be produced as something like . Phonetically, these sounds are not laterals, but vowels; but they function just like [l] in the same position. They are said to be ‘vocalized’. As linguists, one of our jobs is to explain how it comes to be that ‘laterals’ can turn out not to be laterals at all.