Plausible sounds for a species without cheeks

Question

I have an alien species that while similar to humans in many ways have mouths that are closer to muzzles. In short, they do not have cheeks like humans do. I realize that this will effect the sounds they are able to produce and thus their language. Most of their speech will be translated, but I want to know what English language sounds they would be capable of making so that I can give them semi-plausible names that won't baffle English speakers.

One sound set that has already occurred to me is "p" and "b" - both are created largely with the lips. What other English language sounds would not be possible for a species without cheeks?

Note - the species does have vocal cords and tongues. The only major difference is lack of cheeks.

Answer 1

Your aliens will be unable to produce labial consonants.

As you've correctly identified, the biggest challenge in speaking without cheeks will be the lack of lips. In English, the units of sound in speech, or phonemes, that use the lips as active articulators are known as labial consonants.

In English, labial consonants take the form of bilabial or labiodental consonants. Bilabial consonants are ones that are made by pressing the lips together, like 'm', a bilabial nasal, or 'p', a voiceless bilabial plosive, meaning a sound you make by closing your mouth by pressing your lips together and then opening them while expelling air. Labiodental consonants are those made by pressing the upper teeth against the lower lip. Examples of this would be 'v', a voiced labiodental fricative, meaning a sound created by vibrating your vocal cords and pushing air out of your mouth with your lower lip pressed against your teeth, and 'f', a voiceless labiodental fricative which is same as 'v' but without vibrating your vocal cords.

I think that 'm', 'b', 'p', 'v', and 'f' are the only labial consonants in English, though other labial consonants appear in other languages. All other sounds in English are made without the lips as an active articulator, so your cheekless aliens will be able to make them.

All of this is assuming that the aliens don't have any other means of producing these sounds. Parrots, for example, are cheekless, but possess an organ called the syrinx, which allows them to produce what we call labial consonants using a completely different process. If your aliens possess such alternate speech organs, it's possible that they can make any sound that humans can (and some we cannot) without having cheeks.

Answer 2

The sound of all letters where you must twist your lips inwards would be affected. Not that they would not be able to say them, but it would somehow come out differently.

U. cute. brute. dude.

oo. (same as above)

ew. (same as above)

O. con. don. gone.

V. They might have a lot of trouble saying this perfectly. vile. valor. vine.

S. This would be somewhat hissy, slow and prolonged like a snake's or alligator's hiss.

sh. This would probably come out the same as s.

The rest of letters' sounds would be more or less normal.

Answer 3

Instead of "handicapped humans", I.e. exactly like us but with some feature compromised, consider that they may have different features that we lack. They might make sounds we can't. Having a muzzle, they might use that anatomy for distinct speech processes, modulating what we have as a single naisel aspect into an entire family of distinguishable sounds.

I expect they will have longer tongues than we do, to match the long mouth cavity. It might bend into more complex shapes, like a recurve breaking up the chamber into several cavities. So instead of a simple "L" sound, they have both a front touch point and a mid arched toungue at the same time.

The possible sounds, e.g. vowels, depend on the resonant features of everything. The ability to switch between sounds smoothly depends on the motion of the parts forming each sound: what blends together or is a "tongue twister"? So they might have more combinations of sounds that we can't produce smoothly in that order.

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So how about /m/, /n/, being very common in their names, since a rich number of different sounds are translated by cramming them all into m or n + a vowel.

That will give them a distinct feel to the words, which is what you are looking for. You can remark that the real name sounds like a melody on a clarinet and that /mo/... not only fails to distinguish 5 different m's but serializes the /m/ and vowel when the real sound has them simultaneous.

Answer 4

It's not a given that a species without cheeks cannot imitate human speech. As some comments have pointed out, consider parrots and other birds. They can do a pretty good impression of many human sounds, because they produce them differently. Meanwhile, humans are capable of many more sounds than we typically use, but we don't produce them all, and we lose the ability to distinguish between different sounds. It's very difficult for an English speaker to make perfect representations of Chinese sounds, and vice versa, because we draw distinctions between sounds differently. The Mandarin Chinese consonants in shi and xi both sound like "sh" in English, with subtle variation, and English speakers usually struggle to hear the difference. Meanwhile, Chinese speakers will trip over the difference between our "r" and "l" sounds.

This species is likely to have a completely different set of possible sounds, and depending on their local language will use a subset of those sounds to make words, and other sounds they don't use will get merged together, as unimportant differences. Meanwhile, a totally foreign language like English will be a mix of completely impossible sounds, surprisingly possible sounds, easy sounds, and surprisingly-difficult sounds. Just as it's surprising to me that Chinese speakers can make both the "r" and the "l" sounds, yet don't hear the difference and mix them up when speaking, so too your aliens will also mix up sounds. And like birds, they may be able to approximate a "b" or "m" sound using some other mechanism.