Pronouncing English “L”: The Mysterious Dark-L. PART 1

Laura Elias, The ProfessorCoach
6 min readMay 4, 2023
Photo by Zhen Hu on Unsplash

This may be one of the most confusing things about learning English pronunciation!

Some people have been taught that there are two kinds of “L” sounds in English: “light-L” used at the beginnings of words, and “dark-L” (or “velar-L”) for the ends of words.

Dark-L Can Be Misleading

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Laura Elias, The ProfessorCoach

University Instructor | Linguistics - ESL - Spanish | Pronunciation and accent reduction specialist |