Devanagari La ल

La is the twenty-eighth consonant of the varnamala, the third of the four semivowels, and the partner of the rare vocalic l among the vowels. It is a dental lateral, made with the tongue tip at the teeth while the air passes at the sides of the tongue, and the grammarians classed it with the dentals for that reason while placing it among the antahstha in the table. In the older language l and r alternate in ways that vary between the Vedic dialects, some of which strongly prefer one where others prefer the other in the same words, and the relationship between the two is one of the standing questions of Indo-Aryan historical phonology.

A retroflex counterpart exists, absent from classical Sanskrit as a separate letter but present in Vedic recitation and in several modern languages including Marathi; it is written with this letter modified and has its own place in the Unicode encoding. The letter's combining forms in conjuncts are less drastic than those of the semivowel before it, and its independent shape is straightforward to recognise. Both the dictionaries and the Unicode encoding treat the retroflex lateral as a character in its own right rather than as a variant of this one, so a text that uses it can be searched and sorted correctly. Whether a given edition prints it depends on the recitational tradition its editor follows, and the same Vedic passage can appear with the letter in one respectable edition and without it in another.

The alternation between l and r in the Vedic material is a useful way into something the varnamala as a chart cannot show: that the corpus written in this script was transmitted by several schools with their own recitation practices, and that those schools differ from each other in detail. A Vedic text belongs to a particular school, which had its own version of the text and its own way of reciting it, including features of pronunciation that the writing does not always distinguish. The retroflex lateral is one of those: it is a real sound in the recitation of certain Vedic schools and is written where the tradition requires it, while the classical language treated it as a variant and the standard varnamala has no separate place for it.

Modern printed editions therefore differ in whether they mark it, according to which tradition they follow. None of this is visible from a table of the letters, and a reader who takes the chart as a complete description of what Sanskrit sounds like will be surprised by a recitation. This atlas records the classical letter, its articulation and its place, and notes the retroflex counterpart as a real sound with its own sign that the classical table does not carry as a separate letter.