Lalla: The Gurmukhi Letter

Lalla is the thirty-third letter of the Gurmukhi painti and writes an l, made by touching the tongue to the ridge behind the upper teeth and letting the air pass at the sides. It is a frequent letter in Punjabi and in the vocabulary of the Guru Granth Sahib, and it is one of the letters of the script whose written form has been most stable, changing little between manuscript hands, metal type and digital rendering. Lalla is also the base of one of the six dotted extensions that lie outside the painti, the sign for a retroflex lateral, and that extension is the odd one among the six. The other five were added to write sounds that Persian, Arabic and later English words brought into Punjabi and the language did not natively have. This one marks a sound that is native, present in some Punjabi dialects and merged with the plain l in others, so whether a writer uses the dot depends less on the word than on where they are from and on how closely they follow a standardised spelling. It is accordingly the least consistently written of the six.

The stability of the letter is worth a further word, because it is not shared by all of its neighbours. Several Gurmukhi letters have shapes that a rapid hand can pull toward one another, and the retroflex and dental families in particular need care. Lalla does not: its outline is unlike anything adjacent to it in the alphabet, so it survives poor handwriting, bad printing and small screen sizes better than most, and it is one of the letters a reader uses to orient themselves in a difficult manuscript. That combination of high frequency and low ambiguity makes it useful well out of proportion to anything about the sound it writes.