2819: What the ‘El?: Britain is Losing Its L Sep 8, 2024

French is the least conservative when it comes to the original Latin phonology, having lost or changed many of the original features, though not always for the same reasons. L-vocalization refers to the process where the /l/ sound, particularly in syllable-final positions or before consonants, is realized as a vowel, such as [ʊ] or even [o] or semivowel [w]. This led to Modern French beau [bo] from Latin bellu(m) for ‘beautiful’ [masculine], but this process is occurring in some dialects of English, notably Estuary English and Cockney.

In these dialects, words like ‘milk’ [mɪʊk] with the <l> before a consonant, and ‘feel’ like "fiw" [fiːʊ] at the end of a word. In other words, this only occurs with dark-L [ɫ], whereas the light-L [l] is retained, as it only occurs before (and of course between) vowels, so the word ‘mill’ would be pronounced [mɪʊ] or [mɪw] even, but ‘miller’ is /mɪlɚ/. This is in contrast with T-glottalization in these same dialects that can occur at the end of a word like ‘what’ [wɒʔ] or intervocalically like ‘water’ [wɔːʔə].

Of all the sounds children struggle to learn L /l/ (especially dark-L [ɫ]) and R /ɹ/ are often realized as a /w/ since they already have a velarized and vowel-like quality, being reinterpreted as a back vowel or glide. This is the sound shift that occurred in French and is occurring now in some dialects of especially southeastern England.