What would a language spoken by caninoids sound like?

Question

Basically, when designing alien and fantasy races, I tend to try and figure out how they would sound. I originally figured that their language would be made of growls and barks, but then I realized that was too basic. Ask any linguist, and they'll probably tell you that there are no languages that are just merely basic. Every language in real life (and those that have been constructed, i.e. Klingon and Tolkein's Elvish languages) has some sort of complexity and uniqueness to it.

So, this all boils down to the question of how would the spoken language of a caninoid species sound like? Please note that I said spoken language, as I have already figured out that there would be a great deal of body language going on, since they would have tails and ears.

Answer 1

I'm going to take a different tack from the other answers and start from the basis that we have talking canines and figure what about dogs would influence the way they speak. Most of these assume that their mouth somehow retains a somewhat doglike anatomy. If that mouth evolves to come very close to humans' before they start speaking, then the anatomy would have very little effect.

• As I remember it, dog mouths do not close hermetically. So it makes sense that dogs would not be able to pronounce labials (/p/, /b/ and /m/). At least not with the same sort of sound as humans can produce.
• Dogs have muzzles. It seems like an obvious thing to say, but the major differences between vowels (i.e. /i/ and /u/) as well as the various consonants, especially stops (but also fricatives), is where along the palate the tongue make contact. In humans, there are about four such major locations for stops and vowels (depending on your definition), three for laterals (l sounds) and 8 for fricatives, however, it is entirely possible that a species with a muzzle could have access to more sounds (from the point of view of humans) by simple virtue of having more space to clearly separate them.
• I'm not sure what, phonetically speaking, a growl is. It may well be the dog's equivalent of a pharyngeal or uvular fricative or thrill. If it's not, though, it would make for an interesting, foreign phoneme too.
• It's also possible, even likely that dogs's panting would lead to the heavy presence of interdentals (th-sounds), which are crosslinguistically uncommon (and hence are such a bane to foreign learners).

Answer 2

Dogs larynx doesn't have the flexibility needed to emit proper phonemes.

You have then two, possibly combined, approaches:

• enhance canine vocal chords, and then you can have almost anything, phoneme can remind of barks or not (Klingon would be a good approximation, if you want to maintain a canine-sounding language, but that is not required by any extent).
• switch to sign language. Here I'm not referring to "body language" (which is not a real language, even if it conveys a lot of information), but to real sign language, similar to what is used by deaf people; notice the "standard" deaf language is derived from "spoken" languages, but that needn't be the case (see: Nicaraguan Sign Language).

The two approaches may be combined with "enhanced barking" complementing sign which can be hand-signs (if your canine-race is standing upright and as "hands", of course) or other tail/ear/body gestures.

Answer 3

I think instead of dogs you should use foxes as your basis. At the end of the day dogs are dogs and wolves are scary dogs. Foxes are canids too but they have weird vocalizations including screams, mews, coos and "gekkering". As well as more creative Nordic speculation about what they say.

http://www.thinkingoutdog.com/?p=1667

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-09/what-sound-does-fox-make

The problem is that unless you are making a movie and can dub in your canidoids there is no good way to convey how your creatures sound. Describing a sound relies greatly on analogy, like describing a smell. If you spend too much time with descriptive verbiage you risk getting lost in the weeds.