à  or à Â, described in English as L with stroke, is a letter of the Polish, Kashubian, Sorbian, Silesian, Belarusian Latin, Ukrainian Latin, Kurdish (some dialects), Wymysorys, Navajo, Dëne Sà ³à Âñné, Iñupiaq, Zuni, Hupa, Sm'algyañx, Nisga'a, and Dogrib alphabets, several proposed alphabets for the Venetian language, and the ISO 11940 romanization of the Thai script. In some Slavic languages, it represents the continuation of the Proto-Slavic non-palatal (dark L), which evolved further into in Polish, Kashubian, Sorbian, and Silesian. In most non-European languages, it represents a voiceless alveolar lateral fricative or similar sound.
In normal typefaces, the letter has a stroke approximately in the middle of the vertical stem, crossing it at an angle between 70ð and 45ð, never horizontally. In cursive handwriting and typefaces that imitate it, the capital letter has a horizontal stroke through the middle and looks very similar to the pound sign . In the cursive lowercase letter, the stroke is also horizontal and placed on top of the letter instead of going through the middle of the stem, which would not be distinguishable from the letter t. The stroke is either straight or slightly wavy, depending on the style. Unlike , the letter is usually written without a noticeable loop at the top. Most publicly available multilingual cursive typefaces, including commercial ones, feature an incorrect glyph for .
A rare variant glyph of the grapheme is a cursive double-Ã Â ligature, used in words such as ', ' or ' (archaic: Allah), where the strokes at the top of the letters are joined into a single stroke.
In Polish, is used to distinguish the historical dark (velarized) L [ë] from clear L [l]. The Polish now sounds the same as the English , [w] as in water (except for older speakers in some eastern Polish dialects where it still sounds velarized). The name of this diacritic is called the kreska, which is shared with the five letters with acute accents.
In 1440, proposed a letter resembling to represent clear L. For dark L he suggested "l" with a stroke running in the opposite direction to the modern version. The latter was introduced in 1514âÂÂ1515 by Stanisà Âaw Zaborowski in his . L with stroke originally represented a velarized alveolar lateral approximant , a pronunciation that is preserved in the eastern part of Poland and among the Polish minority in Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. This pronunciation is similar to Russian unpalatalised in native words and grammar forms.
In modern Polish, Ã Â is usually pronounced (as [w] in English wet). This pronunciation first appeared among Polish lower classes in the 16th century. It was considered an uncultured accent by the upper classes (who pronounced as ) until the mid-20th century, when this distinction gradually began to fade.
The shift from to in Polish has affected all instances of dark L, even word-initially or intervocalically, e.g. à Âadny ("pretty, nice") is pronounced , sà Âowo ("word") is , and ciaà Âo ("body") is . à  often alternates with clear L, such as the plural forms of adjectives and verbs in the past tense that are associated with masculine personal nouns, e.g. maà Ây â mali ( â ). Alternation is also common in declension of nouns, e.g. from nominative to locative, tà Âo â na tle ( â ).
Polish final à  also often corresponds to Ukrainian word-final Ve (Cyrillic) and Belarusian Short U (Cyrillic). Thus, "he gave" is "daà Â" in Polish, "ôðò" in Ukrainian, "ôðÃÂ" in Belarusian (all pronounced ), but "ôðû" in Russian.
Notable figures
Some examples of words with 'Ã Â':
In contexts where à  is not readily available as a glyph, basic L is used instead. Thus, the surname Maà Âecki would be spelled Malecki in a foreign country.
In the 1980s, when some computers available in Poland lacked Polish diacritics, it was common practice to use a pound sterling sign (ã) for à Â. This practice ceased after DOS-based and Mac computers came with a code page for such characters.
In Belarusian à Âacinka (both in the 1929 and 1962 versions), corresponds to Cyrillic (El), and is normally pronounced (almost exactly as in English pull).
In the North American languages Navajo, Elaponke, and Iñupiaq, is used for a voiceless alveolar lateral fricative , like the Welsh double L.
is used in the orthographic transcription of Ahtna, an Athabaskan language spoken in Alaska; it represents a breathy lateral fricative. It is also used in Tanacross, a related Athabaskan language.
When transcribing Armenian into the Latin alphabet, may be used to write the letter , for example ÃÂøÃÂïáý => à Âukas. In Classical Armenian, was pronounced as , which morphed into in both standard varieties of modern Armenian. Other transcriptions of include , or .
The letter is encoded in Unicode with the codepoints
These symbols are included as standard using the keyboard mapping commonly used in Poland. (For entry on other systems, see Unicode input.)