Lll
The digraph Ll, or ligature Ỻ, was considered —between 1754 and 2010— as the fourteenth letter of the Spanish alphabet and its eleventh consonant, but no longer it is. Its name is feminine: la elle, eỻe or double ele, plural elles, eỻes or double l's.
In Aragonese, Asturian, Aymara, Medieval Spanish, Catalan, Basque, Galician and Quechua, it traditionally represents a palatal lateral phoneme (AFI /ʎ /). Currently, due to yeísmo in most Spanish dialects the digraph < ll > represents a non-lateral phoneme (palatal or postalveolar, depending on the dialect block). Sometimes, it takes the form of L̃ or Ꝇ.
History
In the Ortografía de la lengua española of 1754 it began to be considered as a letter of the Spanish alphabet and from the publication of the fourth edition of the Dictionary of the Spanish language in 1803, the digraph ll had its own section in that work due to its exclusive phonetic value. During the X Congress of the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language held in Madrid in 1994, and upon the recommendation of various bodies, it was agreed to rearrange the digraphs ch and ll in the place assigned to them by the basic Latin alphabet, although they were still part of the alphabet. As a result of the innovations that appeared in the publication of the Ortografía de la lengua española in 2010, both the ch and the ll were no longer considered individual letters, and the Spanish alphabet no longer considered them. includes more. This does not mean, in any way, that they disappear from writing: simply, they are no longer counted among the letters of the alphabet.
Pronunciation
Currently, in much of Spain and America, the lateral palatal phoneme originally represented by this digraph has been lost and has converged with the central palatal phoneme represented by the consonant Y. This phonological change is called yeísmo, and It has advanced notably in Spain in recent decades among the younger generations due to the influence of radio and television (broadcast mainly from Madrid, which is a historically yeísta area).
It can hardly be said that yeísmo is, either originally or currently, a phonetic Andalusian. On both sides of the Atlantic, yeísmo continues to spread today without us being able to establish a direct relationship between innovation in Spain and America. Quite surely, yeísmo has arisen spontaneously in many areas of Spanish due to the scant phonological role of the phoneme /ʎ/.
In Spain, the traditional pronunciation as palatal lateral has thus been relegated today almost completely to the older generations and to rural areas, mainly in Castilla y León, Catalonia, Valencia, Navarra, the Basque Country, Aragon, Murcia and Extremadura. Despite the belief that all of Andalusia is yeísta, there are still traces of distinction in the vicinity of Seville, north of Huelva and areas of the Serranía de Ronda (Málaga province).
In America, the countries that best preserve the distinction of /ʎ/ and /ʝ̞/ are Bolivia, Peru and Paraguay. Until the XX century, the distinction was generally present in the Andean areas of Peru, Ecuador, Colombia and the northeast from Argentina. However, yeísmo gradually expanded to these regions. The persistence of the phoneme /ʎ/ in these regions is due to its introduction into their educational systems and above all to the existence of native languages that also have it, such as Quechua and Aymara. In Spain, the influence of Catalan and Basque in the conservation of the lateral palatal is also notorious.
In Catalan, the digraph «ll» is also distinguished from the long or geminate ele ([lː]), which is represented as l·l (with a period between the two l's), e.g. col·legi, paral·lel.
Just as contact with some languages favors the conservation of the lateral palatal (Catalan, Aymara, Quechua), we also find the opposite case: Spanish exports yeísmo to other languages in bilingual areas. The most striking case is that of Galician, a language that is generalizing the confusion of "ll" and "y" despite the fact that Portuguese, the language closest to Galician and which descends from the same linguistic variety (Galaico-Portuguese, does not present yeísmo in its Iberian varieties.
In most of Argentina and all of Uruguay (Rioplatense Spanish), "ll" (like "y") is pronounced as a voiceless alveolar fricative [ʃ], like the "sh" sound in the English word shirt (shirt) or "ch" in the French word chemin (path). This phenomenon is known as rethreading.
In Italian, the digraph «ll» represents a long or geminate L [l:], p.eg alla, della. On the other hand, the trigraph «gli» represents the phoneme /ʎ/, which becomes geminate in intervocalic position [ʎ:]. eg gli [ʎi]; taglio [taʎ:o]
In Albanian, the digraph «ll» represents a velarized coronal lateral (/ɫ/), similar to the English "l" sound. The «l» in Albanian represents a palatalized coronal lateral (/lʲ/).
In Welsh, «ll» represents a lateral fricative (/ɬ/), same sound available in Nahuatl but written "tl".