Americanist

We use the IPA symbol [ ɫ ], which in the IPA actually represents a velarized or pharyngealized voiced lateral resonant, as a substitute Americanist symbol for the old-fashioned Americanist Barred L symbol that appears in our Milluk database and in Melville Jacobs’ two (1939, 1940) volumes of Coos texts.  That symbol has a straight line through a lower case letter L.  In some fonts, such as the Arial font, which we use, one can hardly tell that our substitute IPA symbol for Barred L has a tilde through it instead of a straight line.  It is more clear that it does in the Charis SIL font that we also use.  

In the Americanist tradition of phonetic writing, phonetic alphabets are custom-made for individual languages.  In doing this, it has been a regular practice over the years for people to adopt symbols from the IPA and from the existing writing systems of European languages, in order to custom-make new phonetic alphabets for languages.  So, our use of the phonetic symbol [ ɫ ] as a substitute symbol for the Barred L symbol (which has a straight line through it) is actually within the Americanist tradition of phonetic writing.