Ł

Ł or ł, described in English as L with stroke, is a letter of the Polish, Kashubian, Sorbian, Belarusian Latin, Ukrainian Latin, Wymysorys, Navajo, Dëne Sųłıné, Inupiaq, Zuni, Hupa, Sm'álgyax, Nisga'a, and Dogrib alphabets, several proposed alphabets for the Venetian language, and the ISO 11940 romanization of the Thai script. In some Slavic languages, it represents the continuation of the Proto-Slavic non-palatal (dark L), except in Polish, Kashubian, and Sorbian, where it evolved further into /w/. In most non-European languages, it represents a voiceless alveolar lateral fricative or similar sound. In normal typefaces, the letter has a stroke approximately in the middle of the vertical stem, crossing it at an angle between 70° and 45°, never horizontally. In cursive handwriting and typefaces that imitate it, the capital letter has a horizontal stroke through the middle and looks very similar to 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 , the letter is usually written without a noticeable loop at the top. Most publicly available multilingual cursive typefaces, including commercial ones, feature an incorrect glyph for . A rare variant of the ł glyph is a cursive double-ł ligature, used in words such as Jagiełło, Radziwiłł or Ałłach (archaic: Allah), where the strokes at the top of the letters are joined into a single stroke. In Polish, is used to distinguish the historical dark (velarized) L [ɫ] from clear L [l]. The Polish now sounds the same as the English , as in water (except for older speakers in some eastern dialects where it still sounds velarized). In 1440, pl proposed a letter resembling to represent clear L. For dark L he suggested "l" with a stroke running in the opposite direction to the modern version.