Ll/ll is a digraph that occurs in several languages.

English
In English,  often represents the same sound as single : . The doubling is used to indicate that the preceding vowel is (historically) short, or that the "l" sound is to be extended longer than a single  would provide (etymologically, in latinisms coming from a gemination). It is worth noting that different English language traditions use  and  in different words: for example the past tense form of "travel" is spelt "" in British English but "" in American English. See also: American and British English spelling differences#Doubled consonants.

Welsh

In Welsh,  stands for a voiceless alveolar lateral fricative sound (IPA: ). This sound is very common in place names in Wales because it occurs in the word , for example, , where the  appears twice, or , where (in the full name) the  appears five times – with two instances of .

In Welsh,  is a separate digraph letter from  (e.g.,  sorts before ). In modern Welsh this, and other digraph letters, are written with two symbols but count as one letter. In Middle Welsh it was written with a tied ligature; this ligature is included in the Latin Extended Additional Unicode block as  and . This ligature is seldom used in Modern Welsh, but equivalent ligatures may be included in modern fonts, for example the three fonts commissioned by the Welsh Government in 2020.

Romance languages

Catalan

In Catalan,  represents the phoneme , as in  (language, tongue),  (linkage, connection), or  (knife).

L with middle dot
In order to not confuse   with a geminated  , Catalan uses a middle dot (interpunct or  in Catalan) in between  . For example  ("excellent"). The first character in the digraph,  and , is included in the Latin Extended-A Unicode block at U+013F (uppercase) and U+0140 (lowercase) respectively.

In Catalan typography,  is intended to fill two spaces, not three, so the interpunct is placed in the narrow space between the two s:  and . However, it is common to write  and , occupying three spaces.  and , although sometimes seen, are incorrect.

Galician
In official Galician spelling the  combination stands for the phoneme  (palatal lateral approximant, a palatal counterpart of ).

Spanish

In Spanish,  was considered from 1754 to 2010 the fourteenth letter of the Spanish alphabet because of its representation of a palatal lateral articulation consonant phoneme (as defined by the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language).
 This single letter was called  pronounced "elye", but often losing the /l/ sound and simplifying to "eh-ye".
 The letter was collated after  as a separate entry from 1803 until April 1994 when the X Congress of the Association of Spanish Language Academies adopted standard Latin alphabet collation rules. Since then, the digraph  has been considered a sequence of two characters. (A similar situation occurred with the Spanish-language digraph ch.)
 Hypercorrection leads some to wrongly capitalize  as a single letter, as with the Dutch IJ, for example * instead of . In handwriting,  is written as a ligature of two s, with distinct uppercase and lowercase forms.
 Today, most Spanish speakers pronounce  and  as the same sound, a phenomenon called yeísmo. In much of the Spanish-speaking Americas, and in many regions of Spain,  and  are pronounced  (voiced palatal fricative); speakers in Colombia and Tabasco, Mexico, as well as Rioplatense speakers in both Argentina and Uruguay, pronounce  and  as  (voiced postalveolar fricative) or  (voiceless postalveolar fricative). The original pronunciation of  —the phoneme  (palatal lateral approximant)— still exists in northern Spain (mostly in rural areas) and in Andes Mountains. In parts of Colombia and in the Andean regions of Ecuador,  is pronounced  but  is pronounced .

Philippine languages
While Philippine languages like Tagalog and Ilocano write  or  when spelling Spanish loanwords,  still survives in proper nouns.  However, the pronunciation of  is simply rather than . Hence the surnames Llamzon, Llamas, Padilla, Bellen, Basallote and Villanueva are respectively pronounced /, , , ,  and /.

Furthermore, in Ilocano  represents a geminate alveolar lateral approximant , like in Italian.

Albanian
In Albanian,  stands for the sound , while  is pronounced as the velarized sound .

Icelandic
In Icelandic, the  can represent  (similar to a voiceless alveolar lateral affricate),  or  depending on which letters surround it.  appears in  ("full", masculine),  appears in  ("full", neuter), and  appears in  ("full", neuter genitive). The geographical name Eyjafjallajökull includes the  sound twice.

Broken L
In Old Icelandic, the broken L ligature appears in some instances, such as  (field) and  (all). It takes the form of a lowercase  with the top half shifted to the left, connected to the lower half with a thin horizontal stroke. This ligature is encoded in the Latin Extended-D Unicode block at U+A746 (uppercase) and U+A747 (lowercase), displaying as Ꝇ and ꝇ respectively.

Inuit-Yupik languages

In Central Alaskan Yupʼik and the Greenlandic language,  stands for .

Other languages
In the Gwoyeu Romatzyh romanization of Mandarin Chinese, final  indicates a falling tone on a syllable ending in , which is otherwise spelled .

In Haida (Bringhurst orthography),  is glottalized .

See also
 Lh (digraph)
 Lj (digraph)
 Hungarian ly

References

Latin-script digraphs