In standard English and module Arabic

Abstract EN

The present study deals with the lateral sounds in Standard English and Mosuli Arabic.

It aims at proving that [l] in Mosuli Arabic is A distinctive sound unit that can replace other sound units to distinguish meaning.

Moreover, laterals in Standard English and Mosuli Arabic are described articulatorily in terms of the distinctive feature theory which is found to be most reliable for predicting the phonetic and phonological behaviour of segments. The study concludes that [l] function as a distinctive phoneme in Mosuli Arabic since meaning is affected if we change the emphatic [l] into its non-emphatic counterpart.

In addition, [l] is velarized in Mosuli Arabic when it occurs near other velarized consonants, e.g.

/ ṣ/ , / ṭ/ and /ð ./