U+02AB "ʫ" Latin Small Letter Lz Digraph Unicode Character

U+02AB "ʫ" Latin Small Letter Lz Digraph is a typographic ligature representing a single sound unit, primarily used in phonetic transcription systems such as the International Phonetic Alphabet to denote the voiced alveolar lateral affricate, a consonant sound made by beginning with a plosive and releasing it into a lateral fricative. This character was encoded in Unicode to support precise linguistic notation, particularly for writing African languages like the Bassa language of Liberia, where it represents a distinct phonemic sound. Its visual form combines a lowercase "l" and "z" into a single connected glyph, reflecting its role as an individual speech sound rather than a sequence of two separate letters.