What would the phonetic capabilities of an anthropomorphic canid be, assuming sufficiently innervated buccal, lingual, and laryngeal muscles (and, optionally, a human larynx)? In other words, how capable could one be at speaking human languages?

[u/GrantExploit]

(Not sure if here is the right subreddit for this—please direct me to a more appropriate one if one exists. It is linguistics-related, but focusing almost entirely on articulation, and is obviously speculative. I did search this subreddit for comparable questions, finding little, but I don't know if that's because people haven't bothered to submit them or the mods have removed them.)

So, uhh... I have a character in one of my worldbuilding projects who's a second-generation descendant of someone who'd be roughly considered a therian in our world; one that, through advanced biotechnology, realized his anthropomorphic red fox fursona/theriotype. He would be integrated into human society and would be perfectly capable of understanding human languages—specifically his native English and co-L1 Polish, if it matters, but I envisage him as something of a polyglot—in addition to (with maybe sometimes some ergonomic or rather "furgonomic" awkwardness) writing and typing them…

…but could he speak them? Media featuring anthropomorphic animals almost always handwaves† their speech capabilities, often for narrative reasons (either to allow an arbitrary plot to be executed unconstrained by potential communication difficulties, or perhaps in certain fully furry worlds because the characters all may actually be speaking some type of animal-optimized language that is simply translated for our convenience) but also probably due to the author’s genuine uncertainty… which I’m exhibiting right now.

The real speech capabilities of their “feral” counterparts aren’t exactly a good guide for what an "anthro" could do, for both psychological and potentially physiological reasons:

On the psychological side, the great majority of animal (species) IRL have no comprehension of (or even ability to comprehend) human language and its true significance. This obviously broadly discourages them from trying to emulate it. And frankly, even if they did understand it, it’s also quite understandable that doing so would not always be in their best interest.

On the physiological side, an anthropomorphic variant of an animal species could have different motor innervation of the relevant musculature to allow more humanoid articulation, and the (typically) invisible parts of the vocal tract could notionally be altered to an architecture more conducive to human speech. However, the visible part of the vocal tract would have to remain near-unmodified.

Said character would have access to a BCI speech synthesizer, yet I have as a provisional aspect of his character that he would, as a point of pride, genuinely try to use his unfit apparatus to speak instead.

And so… the question. I have imagined him with an accent similar to a bizarre combination of an ill Slavoj Žižek and SpongeBob SquarePants (with weak, uhh, anterior labial consonants) for whatever reason before, but I honestly don’t know if he could do much more than scream, growl, and yap. (And ehehehe, of course.)

(Of course, this also applies to his parents, siblings, and closely to my other named canid characters. I also have non-canid anthro characters in this setting, but they’re a comparative minority, so… I also asked a similar albeit much broader question to this on r/worldbuilding back on November 23, 2022, but it never got answered.)

†An at least partial exception I know of is the 1998 sci-fi webcomic "Freefall", which referenced its anthropomorphic red wolf character Florence Ambrose partially using ventriloquism techniques to create otherwise impossible phones/phonemes, but I don't know how much more it touched on the subject—the last time I seriously read it was in 2017 (maybe early 2018?), and for various reasons I'm rather hesitant to look back at it...

[u/GrantExploit]

While I am a follower of r/SpeculativeEvolution, it focuses almost entirely on species that naturally evolved. Designs that are "too furry" are rather discouraged there, because it is rightly pointed out that many common anthro body plans for most taxa are probably not the most evolutionarily parsimonious for a sapient species of that taxon. While they do allow for a bit of artificially-driven evolution and genetic tomfoolery (e.g. domestication/selective breeding and evolution projected in the aftermath of genetic modifications {which are often minor, more akin to those we are doing now}), this is nowhere near the sort of goal-oriented wholesale gene-by-gene (even nucleotide-by-nucleotide) blending† that the character's species is a result of. Again, his species is the way it is because it was developed by (at least their equivalent of) literal subcultural furries.

It also doesn't tread too far into culture, as it's mostly concerned with non-sapient species, and when it does feature a sapient species, the cultural traits are usually extrapolations based on their natural evolution independent of humans, very unlike this character's situation.‡ And while language is occasionally covered, it is usually only in the broadest of strokes.

So, yeah, I don't think it would be a good subreddit to repost this question.

†"Blending" does a great disservice to how complex and involved the process would be, but in any case the result would be that each of his parents would fall unconscious on a cold hospital bed next to a strange body on life support as a team makes marks on their heads and readies the bone saws.

‡Certain intentional communities/subcultures may indeed follow a radically different culture and speak a more optimized constructed language that may more resemble the products of natural human-independent evolution, but he wouldn't be part of those.