Voiced dental and alveolar lateral fricatives

The voiced alveolar lateral fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents voiced dental, alveolar, and postalveolar lateral fricatives is ⟨ɮ⟩ (sometimes referred to as lezh), and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is.

Features
Features of the voiced alveolar lateral fricative:

Alveolar
In addition, a pharyngealized voiced alveolar lateral fricative is reconstructed to be the ancient Classical Arabic pronunciation of Ḍād; the letter is now pronounced in Modern Standard Arabic as a pharyngealized voiced coronal stop, as alveolar  or denti-alveolar.

Voiced lateral-median fricative
The voiced alveolar non-sibilant fricative (also known as a "lisp" fricative) is a consonantal sound. Consonants is pronounced with simultaneous lateral and central airflow.

Features
However, it does not have the grooved tongue and directed airflow, or the high frequencies, of a sibilant.

Related characters
There are several Unicode characters based on lezh (ɮ):
 * is a superscript IPA letter
 * is a superscript IPA letter
 * is an extension to IPA for disordered speech (extIPA)

Notation
In 1938, a symbol shaped similarly to heng ⟨ꜧ⟩ was approved as the official IPA symbol for the voiced alveolar lateral fricative, replacing ⟨ɮ⟩. It was suggested at the same time, however, that a compromise shaped like something between the two may also be used at the author's discretion. It was this compromise version that was included in the 1949 Principles of the International Phonetic Association and the subsequent IPA charts, until it was replaced again by ⟨ɮ⟩ at the 1989 Kiel Convention. Despite the Association's prescription, ⟨ɮ⟩ is nonetheless seen in literature from the 1960s to the 1980s.