Cyrillic Small Letter El

It writes an l sound in Cyrillic words.

In Ukrainian and Russian, the next letter decides whether л sounds hard or soft: a soft sign ь or vowels like я and ю soften it. Serbian and Macedonian instead use a separate letter, љ, for soft l.

Cyrillic emerged after 893 in the First Bulgarian Empire to write Slavic languages, using Greek letters as models; л grew from Greek lambda. Glagolitic, an earlier Slavic alphabet, was used alongside it in the 10th–11th centuries, and its matching letter is ⰾ.

Why does л look different in different fonts?

Some typefaces draw the same letter in different shapes.

A л may have a small foot on the left or look like Λ. These are font styles of one letter, not different characters.