Ł

Glyph shape

In normal typefaces, the letter has a stroke approximately in the middle of the vertical stem, passing it at an angle between 70° and 45°, never perpendicularly. In cursive handwriting and typefaces that imitate it, the capital letter has a horizontal stroke through the middle and looks almost exactly the same as the pound sign, £. In the cursive lowercase letter, the stroke is also horizontal and placed on top of the letter instead of going through the middle of the stem, which would not be distinguishable from the letter t. The stroke is either straight or slightly wavy, depending on the style. Unlike l, the letter ł is usually written without a noticeable loop at the top. Most publicly available multilingual cursive typefaces, including commercial ones, feature an incorrect glyph for ł.

A rare variant of the ł glyph is a cursive double-ł ligature, used in words such as Jagiełło or Ałłach (archaic: Allah), where the strokes at the top of the letters are joined into a single stroke.

Polish

In Polish, Ł is used to distinguish historical dark (velarized) L from clear L. The Polish Ł sounds similar to the English "w".

In 1440 Jakub Parkoszowic proposed a letter resembling   ℓ to represent clear L. For dark L he suggested l with a stroke running in the opposite direction as the modern version. The latter was introduced in 1514–1515 by Stanisław Zaborowski in his Orthographia seu modus recte scribendi et legendi Polonicum idioma quam utilissimus. L with stroke originally represented a velarized alveolar lateral approximant [ɫ], a pronunciation that is preserved in the eastern part of Poland and among the Polish minority in Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. This pronunciation is similar to Russian unpalatalised <Л> in native words and grammar forms.

In modern Polish, Ł is normally pronounced /w/ (exactly as w in English as a consonant, as in were, will, wall but not as in new or straw). This pronunciation first appeared among Polish lower classes in the 16th century. It was considered an uncultured accent by the upper classes (who pronounced Ł almost exactly as: л in East Slavic languages or L in English pull) until the mid-20th century when this distinction gradually began to fade.

The shift from [ɫ] to [w] in Polish has affected all instances of dark L, even word-initially or intervocalically, e.g. ładny ("pretty, nice") is pronounced [ˈwadnɨ], słowo ("word") is [ˈswɔvɔ], and ciało ("body") is [ˈtɕawɔ]. Ł often alternates with clear L, such as the plural forms of adjectives and verbs in the past tense that are associated with masculine personal nouns, e.g. mały → mali ([ˈmawɨ] → [ˈmali]). Alternation is also common in declension of nouns, e.g. from nominative to locative, tło → na tle ([twɔ] → [naˈtlɛ]).

Polish final Ł also often corresponds to Ukrainian word-final <В> (Cyrillic) and Belarusian <Ў> (Cyrillic). Thus, "he gave" is "dał" in Polish, "дав" in Ukrainian, "даў" in Belarusian (all pronounced [daw]), but "дал" [daɫ] in Russian. The old pronunciation [ɫ] of Ł is still fully understandable but is considered theatrical in most regions.

Examples

Historic figures

Some examples of words with 'ł':

In countries where Ł is not available, basic L is used instead. Thus, the surname Małecki would be spelled Malecki in a foreign country. Similarly, the stroke is sometimes omitted on the internet, as may happen with all diacritic-enhanced letters. Leaving out the diacritic does not impede communication for native speakers, but it may be confusing for those learning Polish.

Other languages

In Belarusian Łacinka, Ł corresponds to Cyrillic л, and is normally pronounced /ɫ/ (almost exactly as l in English pull), both in the 1929 and 1962 versions.

The letter Ł is also used for non-Slavic languages.

In Navajo, Ł is used for a voiceless alveolar lateral fricative (ɬ), like the Welsh Ll.

In Venetian Ł is used in substitution for L in many words in which the pronunciation of L has become different for several varieties of the language, such as becoming mute, or becoming the sound of the shorter vowel corresponding to ɰ or /ɛ/. For example: "la gondoła" can be pronounced as (in Venetian dialects) "la góndola", or "la góndoa", or "la góndoea" with such shorter /ɛ̆/.

When writing IPA for some Scandinavian dialects where the pronunciation of a retroflex flap exists, for example in Eastern Norwegian dialects, authors may employ Ł.

Ł is used in orthographic transcription of Ahtna, an Athabaskan language spoken in Alaska; it represents a breathy lateral fricative. It is also used in Tanacross, a related Athabaskan language.

Computer usage

The Unicode codepoints for the letter are U+0142 for the lower case, and U+0141 for the capital. In the LaTeX typesetting system Ł and ł may be typeset with the commands L{} and l{}, respectively. The HTML-codes are Ł and ł for Ł and ł, respectively.

Litecoin

The Ł symbol is often associated with the Litecoin crypto-currency. It represents the largest and most common denomination of Litecoin.