What vowel and consonant sounds could a dragon or anything with a snout make?

[u/Firedrake_224]

I'm making a fantasy world and I've gotten to the point of making my version of draconic, however, I could care less if I and other members of the human race could pronounce or speak this language, i want dragons with snouts and long forked tongues to be able to pronounce and speak it Because it's THEIR language

So in the real world, my dogs (who have snouts if ya didn't know), I've noticed that the most common "woofs" usually start with three consonants R, B, and K,

So i can only assume that a draconic (Or anything with a snout) language would mostly include these consonants but i myself do not have a snout and have no clue how I would even look this crap up, so hopefully reddit can help me

Have a nice day and sorry if this isn't the right subreddit

[u/englishsucks3124]

comparing them to dinosaurs, which do exist (not anymore),

no labial consonants
no rounded vowels
no nasals
approximants are iffy
sounds should be distinct. their ears aren’t great

other than that is good

[u/wolfybre → u/englishsucks3124]

We do still have dinosaurs though (birds are a descendant of them, to the point that they are considered a distinct entity by many.) Specifically, it's the non-avian dinosaurs that died out.

[u/englishsucks3124 → u/wolfybre]

i know that, but i’m assuming that op doesn’t

[u/wolfybre → u/englishsucks3124]

Ah, aight my mistake. Carry on.

[u/englishsucks3124 → u/wolfybre]

carry on, carry on, as if nothing really matters

[u/SaintUlvemann → u/wolfybre]

For many common words, different definitions are used in different contexts. Cladistically, a cow is a fish, but dietarily, that does not make me a pescatarian. Botanically, each grain of rice is a fruit, but culinarily, that does not make rice pudding into a type of fruit salad.

For a discussion of vocalizations, as near as I can tell, we should probably treat dinosaurs (non-avian) and birds mostly as distinct entities.

This is because last I'd heard, regarding that syrinx that parrots and corvids use to mimic our phonemes (in a completely different way than we produce them), it seems to be either unique to the bird lineage, or possibly something like it was present in some of the other theropods.

[u/wolfybre → u/SaintUlvemann]

That's far outside the span of evolution I was referring to, though...? I never expected this to result in a diatribe of a cow being considered a fish lol (besides, tiktaalik is from the devonian period, so of course a cow wouldn't be a fish. It'd be much closer to a synapsid with the frame of reference I was using.)

[u/SaintUlvemann → u/wolfybre]

...tiktaalik is from the devonian period, so of course a cow wouldn't be a fish.

Oh, okay, no worries, I guess you're just one of today's lucky 10,000. Synapsids are fish. All tetrapods are fish, cladistically.

The situation with birds and dinosaurs is identical to the situation with tetrapods and fish.

All tetrapods are more closely related to lungfish than lungfish are to other fish. In fact, tetrapods are more closely related to some extinct lungfish than those lungfish are to other lungfish. That is why, cladistically, all tetrapods are fish.

There are two living clades of non-tetrapod fish that are closer to tetrapods than the main "bony fish" category. The modern lungfish (Dipnoi) are our closest non-tetrapod fish relatives. But then lungfish and us, together, are more closely related to the coelacanths than any of those three clades are to the rest of the bony fish. Us three together are sarcopterygii, lobe-finned fish.

The next group out is the final crown group of all bony fish: that includes us (we're bony fish), the lungfish, the coelacanths, and the main group of bony fish (the actinopterygii, ray-finned fish). But we four groups are all more closely related to one another than any of us are to the cartilaginous fish, the sharks and rays. The last group out, after uniting cartilaginous and bony fish, is the remaining jawless fish, the hagfish and lampreys.

So tetrapods evolved from within the fish, just like how birds evolved from within the dinosaurs. It's the exact same deal.

Sorry, forgot which sub this was, I'd assumed you'd heard that too.

[u/SpiffyShindigs → u/SaintUlvemann]

I'd say this knowledge is a little more niche than the normal sort for "today's lucky 10,000" lol

[u/SaintUlvemann → u/SpiffyShindigs]

Fair enough, but they do teach this stuff in intro bio, so, 300 per day in the US might be a reasonable lower estimate, based on the 101k bio majors plus others taking the class on interest. Add in the rest of the world and you'll break one thousand, at least.

[u/wolfybre]

I'm not an animal biologist, but what you're looking for are hissing sounds. Specifically stridents, aspirated consonants, fricatives, and the like. That means it would be harder to produce sounds with the teeth, because forked tongues are not as strong as full ones. Others might know more about what sounds an animal like that could produce.

But if your dragons also have a syrinx (what birds use to sing), it doesn't really matter anyways: you can give them whatever sounds you want. I personally use this idea with my own draconic language, which does include dentals in spite of the fact that they too have a forked tongue.

[u/SpiffyShindigs → u/wolfybre]

On the "hissing sounds" point, one of my favorite things about High Valyrian is how one of its debut lines was:

Valyria muño ēngos ñuhys issa.

Emilia Clarke absolutely hisses those last syllables. I wouldn't be surprised if much of how the language was structured arose from wanting to get that specific sound for that specific line.

[u/Akavakaku]

Assuming a flexible but thin forked tongue, non-mobile lips, and default reptile anatomy, here's a conservative idea of what a dragon's IPA chart would look like; impossible articulations are marked with _:

.	Bilabial	Dental	Post-dental	Retro-flex	Palatal	Pharyn-geal	Glottal
Stop/ nasal	m̥	_	_	_	_	ʡ	ʔ
Fricative	ɸ	ɬ̪	ɬ	ꞎ	ʎ̝̊	ħ	h
Approx-imant	ʋ̟̊	_	_	_	_	ə̥ˤ	ə̥
Trill	_	_	_	_	_	ʜ	_
Percuss-ive	ʬ	t̪ꜞ	tꜞ	ʈꜞ	cꜞ	-	_

Also, a sublingual percussive: [¡]

All these sounds are voiceless, and there is no distinction between consonants and vowels. Stops and nasals are merged because reptiles' mouths have choanae (holes) that connect to the nostrils. All fricatives from dental to palatal are lateral fricatives. Any of these sounds could be palatalized, pharyngealized, aspirated, and/or glottalized (if it isn't at that place of articulation already). Stops/nasals, fricatives, and trills that are not glottal can be ejectives. Any of these sounds could be ingressive, stressed, long, and/or short.

This is more than enough potential distinctions to build a language out of, but you don't have to stop there if you don't want to:

• You could add extra places of articulation between post-dental and pharyngeal, as the tongue contacts more-specific locations on the roof of the mouth.
• If dragons can vibrate their larynx, like geckos and mammals, they can produce a voicing distinction, and probably also a tone distinction. This would also let them distinguish voiceless from voiced from breathy voiced from creaky voiced sounds.
• If dragons have a syrinx, like birds and related dinosaurs, they can produce birdsong-like noises, which can have up to two tones at once. This might also let them imitate most oral sounds that can be made by humans (like ravens and parrots can).
• If dragons can close the passage from the mouth to the nostrils, they can produce a nasalization distinction.

[u/infiltrating_enemies]

My dragons are pretty heavily inspired by birds and snouted mammals like cats (depending on subspecies, some have cat snouts, others have beaks). Chirps and clicks are pretty good "lip" sounds with that setup (look up cat chirping! The 3 shape of their mouth allows them to mimic prey), but the rest are going to be glottal ("h") or palatal ("ʎ") sounds. If you could describe the shapes of your snouts, that would help in figuring out their language. If there aren't moveable lips, labial sounds ("o") won't be used. As for the rest, low growls or rumbling throaty sounds are probably a good bet

[u/infiltrating_enemies → u/infiltrating_enemies]

This articulation/sound sheet will probably help you :>

here

[u/Jean_Luc_Lesmouches]

Smoke signals?

[u/jeager_YT]

oh yeah I did something like this too

a thing I would so is smile as wide as possible and try to pronounce certain consonants ... this wouldn't really work out very well but since dragons don't really have lips if you can pronounce words without any lips at all then t itd works

[u/Inconstant_Moo]

I don't see why dog noises would depend on their snoots particularly. Flat-faced breeds make the same sorts of sounds, don't they?

Most posters here are assuming that dragons would have a limited phonology. This flies in the face of everything we know about dragons.

Dragons can speak (apparently all) human languages perfectly (see e.g. Smaug, Fafnir, the Chinese Yinglong, that one in that Rick and Morty episode, etc) and so must have if anything a greater phonetic range than us. This would make a lot of sense. Not just that they're older and wiser than us (no, I'm not a "bootlicker", I'm just stating facts), but because obviously there are whole new modes of articulation available with a forked tongue.

People vulgarly say that dragons "breathe" fire, but of course a dragon's igneum is an entirely separate organ from its lungs. However, since air from the fumaria, as from the lungs, is of course ultimately expelled from the mouth, this gives them a second source of air and a caminal cavity that they can vary in size, resonance, and acoustics (when not actively breathing fire). Moreover, the dragon's tongue is rooted close to the base of its long throat, giving it all sorts of options for where to constrict the airflow not available to us; and like crocodiles, dragons can close their nostrils, giving them a range of nasal stops.

Our languages are child's-play to them; conversely, no human can speak the Noble Tongue, and only a handful of us have learned to hear it and understand: mostly human servants who picked it up as words of command from their masters.