Ll/ll is a digraph which occurs in several natural languages.
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In English, ll represents the same sound as single l: /l/. The doubling is used to indicate that the preceding vowel is (historically) short, or for etymological reasons, in latinisms.
In Spanish and official Galician spelling the ll combination stands for the phoneme /ʎ/ (palatal lateral approximant, a palatal /l/). However, nowadays most Spanish speakers, as well as some Galicians, pronounce ll the same as y (yeísmo). As a result, in most parts of Latin America as well as in many regions of Spain, Spanish speakers pronounce it /ʝ/ (voiced palatal fricative), while some other Latin Americans (especially Rioplatense speakers, and in Tabasco, Mexico) pronounce it /ʒ/ (voiced postalveolar fricative) or /ʃ/ (voiceless postalveolar fricative).
This digraph is considered a single letter in Spanish orthography, called elle. From 1803 it was collated after L as a separate entry, a practice now abandoned: in April 1994, a vote in the X Congress of the Association of Spanish Language Academies ruled the adoption of the standard Latin alphabet collation rules, so that for purposes of collation the digraph ll is now considered a sequence of two characters.[1] The same is now true of the Spanish-language digraph ch. Hypercorrection leads some to wrongly capitalize it as a single letter (*"LLosa" instead of the official "Llosa"; "LLOSA" is the right form in full uppercase) as with the Dutch IJ. In handwriting, it is written as a ligature of two L's, with a distinct uppercase and lowercase form. An old ligature for Ll is known as the "broken L", which takes the form of a lowercase l with the top half shifted to the left, connected to the lower half with a thin horizontal stroke. This ligature is encoded in Unicode at U+A746 (uppercase) and U+A747 (lowercase).
In Catalan, ll represents the phoneme /ʎ/. For example, as in llengua "language" or "tongue", enllaç "linkage", "connection" or coltell "knife". In order to not confuse ll /ʎ/ with a geminate l /ll/, the ligature l·l is used with the second meaning. For example, excel·lent is the Catalan word for "excellent", from Latin excellente. In Catalan, l·l must occupy two spaces, so the interpunct is placed in the narrow space between the two L: ĿL and ŀl. However, it is more common to write L·L and l·l, occupying three spaces; this practice is not correct although it's tolerated. L.L and l.l are incorrect and not accepted. See interpunct for more information.
While Philippine languages like Tagalog and Ilokano write ly or li in the spelling of Spanish loanwords, ll still survives in proper nouns. However, the pronunciation of ll is simply [lj] rather than [ʎ]. Hence the surnames Padilla and Villanueva are respectively pronounced [pɐˈdɪːlja] and [ˌbɪːljanuˈwɛːba].
Furthermore, in Ilokano ll represents a geminate alveolar lateral approximant /lː/, like in Italian.
In Albanian, L stands, as in Spanish, for the sound /l/, while Ll is pronounced as the velarized sound /ɫ/.
In Welsh, ll stands for a voiceless lateral fricative sound. The IPA signifies this sound as /ɬ/. This sound is very common in place names in Wales because it occurs in the word Llan, meaning "parish" or "church of Saint ...", for example, Llanelli, where the ll appears twice, or the invented place-name Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyllllantysiliogogogoch, where the ll appears five times. These Welsh place names therefore very often bear simplified pronunciations in English (generally the ll sound being replaced by chl (the ch pronounced as in loch)). In dictionaries, LL is treated as a separate letter from L (e.g. lwc sorts before llaw).
In the Gwoyeu Romatzyh romanization of Mandarin Chinese, final -ll indicates a falling tone on a syllable ending in /ɻ/, which is otherwise spelled -l.
In Central Alaskan Yup'ik and the Greenlandic language, ll stands for /ɬː/, and in Haida (Bringhurst orthography) it is glottalized /ˀl/.