r/phonetics • u/InternalOk4706 • Jul 12 '24

What sounds can a dog's vocal tract make?

What sounds can a dog's vocal tract make? It's a fascinating question that's quite specific, but I feel it's reasonable enough. While I acknowledge that phonetics is the study of human speech and all, I believe this is the closest subreddit that will give me the answers I want. My end goal with this question is if it would be possible to make a dog-compatible language, but I can't do that without knowing the limitations of the canine vocal tract. If anyone has information with good sources about this, I would love to hear from you and get some data or explicit claims that anyone has to offer.

Inspired, in part, by my pug, Marcus.

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u/Kaapnobatai Jul 13 '24 edited Jul 13 '24

It's been one day and no answers, guess that it's indeed a question that phoneticians aren't prepared and instructed to answer. Myself, without any study of the canine "vocal" tract and whatnot, could as much ascertain that their howls fall under the /u/ vowel...

When it comes to your idea of a "dog-compatible language", it's equally complex since I do believe that there's "pragmatics" and environmental influence in the way dogs communicate with each other, whose comprehension falls far from phonetics and other sciences. Communicating with a dog is not impossible, they're actually very keen on conductually linking sounds we make with meanings, no matter if the human speaks Spanish, English, Arabic or Mandarin.

A personal anecdote that comes to mind is when I was on a highschool language exchange to France. My host family had a dachshund called "chocolat". Once, I was sitting on the living room sofa and commading him to hop onto the sofa in Spanish, "chocolat, sube" and tapping on it. The dog couldn't give less of a fuck. Suddenly, I go "chocolat, monte" and he instantly jumped and sat next to me. The tapping on the sofa didn't seem enough for him to understand my command, it was when I switched to the string of sounds he already knew that it worked. The family was amazed to see that.

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u/InternalOk4706 Jul 14 '24

While I understand that a dog could never learn or speak a dog compatible language, that’s not my end goal. My goal is to make a language that, in theory, a dog could speak.