Greek alphabet
International Phonetic Alphabet

Several Greek letters are used as phonetic symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Several of them denote fricative consonants; the rest stand for variants of vowel sounds. The glyph shapes used for these letters in specialized phonetic fonts is sometimes slightly different from the conventional shapes in Greek typography proper, with glyphs typically being more upright and using serifs, to make them conform more with the typographical character of other, Latin-based letters in the phonetic alphabet. Nevertheless, in the Unicode encoding standard, the following three phonetic symbols are considered the same characters as the corresponding Greek letters proper:

On the other hand, the following phonetic letters have Unicode representations separate from their Greek alphabetic use, either because their conventional typographic shape is too different from the original, or because they also have secondary uses as regular alphabetic characters in some Latin-based alphabets, including separate Latin uppercase letters distinct from the Greek ones.

The symbol in Americanist phonetic notation for the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative is the Greek letter lambda ⟨ λ ⟩, but ⟨ ɬ ⟩ in the IPA. The IPA symbol for the palatal lateral approximant is ⟨ ʎ ⟩, which looks similar to lambda, but is actually an inverted lowercase y.
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