Theta wrote:Jetboy wrote:brandrinn wrote:
Dark L in "rural?" Maybe in lower Alabama they treat the English language with such disdain, but surely in no civilized part of the the country/world.
But dark L is a good thing to mention if it hasn't been already. Needs to die in a fire.
Isn't dark (velarized) /l/ the non-prevocalic allophone in both GenAm and RP? Or is syllabic /l/ an exception to that?
Many dialects of English in the US (and in England as far as I know) have dark l in
all positions. Mine does.
Mine doesn't even
have a "light" or a "dark" /l/, period. The closest is a lateral velar approximant, and that is primarily found in careful speech and when geminate. Most of the time it is just a velar approximant or a back offglide agreeing in rounding with what it follows and, in cases, precedes, the details of which are a rather complex matter.
When I do hear
either a "light" or "dark" /l/, but
especially the former, in my dialect, it is almost always either "learned", a different dialect after all, or simply a non-native speaker of English.
(In actual everyday speech I specifically associate the "light" /l/ with either non-native or affected speech, and am only used to hearing it being used by native speakers when singing.)
