In English, ll often represents the same sound as single l:. The doubling is used to indicate that the preceding vowel is short, or that the "l" sound is to be extended longer than a single "l" would provide. It is worth noting that different English language traditions transpose "l" and "ll": British English "travelled" and like words, for example, are usually spelled with a single "l" in U.S. English.
In Spanish, ll ' was considered from 1754 to 2010 the fourteenth letter of the Spanish alphabet because of its representation of a palatal lateral articulation consonant phoneme.
This single letter was called "elle," pronounced "elye," but often losing the /l/ sound and simplifying to "eh-ye."
ll' as a single letter, as with the Dutch IJ, for example "LLosa" instead of "Llosa." In handwriting, Ll is written as a ligature of two Ls, with distinct uppercase and lowercase forms.
Today, most Spanish speakers outside of Spain pronounce ll with virtually the same sound as y, a phenomenon called yeísmo. In much of the Spanish-speaking Americas, and in many regions of Spain, ll is produced ; in Colombia and Tabasco, Mexico, as well as Rioplatense speakers in Argentina, pronounce ll as or .
In order to not confuse ll with a geminatedl, Catalan uses an L with a middle dot in the digraph ŀl, for example exceŀlent. The first character in the digraph, Ŀ and ŀ, is included in the Latin Extended-A Unicode block at U+013F and U+140 respectively. In Catalan typography, l·l is intended to fill two spaces, not three, so the interpunct is placed in the narrow space between the two L: ĿL and ŀl. However, it is common to write L·L and l·l, occupying three spaces. L.L and l.l, although sometimes seen, are incorrect.
While Philippine languages like Tagalog and Ilocano write ly or li when spelling Spanish loanwords, ll still survives in proper nouns. However, the pronunciation of ll is simply rather than. Hence the surnames Llamzon, Llamas, Padilla and Villanueva are respectively pronounced /,, and /. Furthermore, in Ilocano ll represents a geminatealveolar lateral approximant, like in Italian.
In Icelandic, the ll represents either the sound combination or , depending on the context. It occurs in the wordsfell, fjall, and jökull, and consequently in the names of many geographical features, including Eyjafjallajökull.
Broken L
In Old Icelandic, the broken L ligature appears in some instances, such as vꜹꝇum and oꝇo. It 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 the Latin Extended-DUnicode block at U+A746 and U+A747, displaying as Ꝇ and ꝇ respectively.
