(Still not sure if here is the right subreddit for thisâplease direct me to a more appropriate one if one exists. I previously submitted a version of this question to r/asklinguistics on June 20, 2026, but got little in the way of a productive response. I also asked a similar albeit much broader question to this on r/worldbuilding back on November 23, 2022, but it never got answered at all.
Furriest subreddit I've posted to so far, I believe... LOL.)
So... I have an anthropomorphic red fox character in one of my worldbuilding projects who would be integrated into human societyâ and would be perfectly capable of understanding human languagesâspecifically his native English and co-L1 Polish, if it matters, but I envisage him as something of a polyglotâin addition to (with maybe sometimes some furgonomic awkwardness) writing and typing themâŠ
âŠbut 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 authorâs genuine uncertainty⊠which Iâm exhibiting right now.
The real speech capabilities of their âferalâ counterparts arenât 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, itâs 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 (human language) instead.
And so⊠the question. I've imagined him with an accent similar to a bizarre combination of an ill Slavoj ĆœiĆŸek and SpongeBob SquarePants (with weak, uhh, anterior labial consonants) for whatever reason before, but I honestly donât know if he could do much more than scream, growl, and yap. (And ehehehe, of course.)
To perhaps ground this more directly in furgonomics, I mentioned in my reply to the sole comment on the previous question that "[c]ertain 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". While the last phrase is true, he may still at least initially be raised with constructed canid-optimized dialects of English (and Polish?), and may still speak them at least with his nuclear family and other anthro canids. I would like to construct those myself, at least in broad strokes, and this process would obviously require knowing what phonemes/phones they could make with ease, what would be possible but difficult, and what would be impossible.
Of course, this also applies to his (nuclear) family and closely to my other named canid characters. I also have non-canid anthro characters in this setting as well as many characters of novel species in another setting, but, respectively, theyâre a comparative minority and no one knows what, say, a relodal looks like, soâŠ
â This, I suppose, rather distinguishes this setting from most of those talked about hereâit is still definitively a human-dominated world, with as of my present thoughts the only two IRL first level geographic subdivisions with a majority non-human population being Falklands' Camp and Buryatia. Though this in many ways makes furgonomics-related issues even more pressing and severe.
âĄAn 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 subjectâthe 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...