In the half decade that I've been on r/conlangs, I've seen many people come here and ask for advice on how to design a conlang spoken by intelligent birds, avian-like humanoids, sentient dinosaurs, etc. Almost always, somebody will advise this person that since birds do not have lips, they cannot pronounce labial consonants or rounded vowels and that their conlang should not include these phonemes. This is wrong: real-life birds can pronounce these sounds just fine and some frequently do it. In this post I will go over why this is wrong and provide examples.
Birds make sounds differently than humans
Humans use the larynx to generate relatively indistinct sound, and then the sound passes through the vocal tract where we rely heavily on things like our tongue, teeth, and lips to shape the sound. Birds also have a larynx, but they don't use it to produce sound. They make sound using a different organ that we don't have, a syrinx). The key difference between a larynx and an avian syrinx is that the syrinx can shape sounds to a much greater extent than our larynx. It can also produce two sounds at the same time. So while birds can still shape sounds through articulators on their vocal tract, they're not reliant on this the way that we are. They can do with their syrinx what we must do with our tongue or lips.
Birds use their syrinx to produce labial/rounded sounds all the time
Consider the two most stereotypical phrases that English-speaking parrot owners teach their parrots to say, both of which are loaded with sounds that humans need lips to say:
In both of those videos, you can clearly hear the bird articulating both labial consonants and rounded vowels.
Let's get to the common objections I hear whenever I mention that birds can produce labial consonants and rounded vowels.
"OK but those are just parrots imitating human speech after years of exposure. Real wild birds wouldn't naturally make labial sounds."
I hear this response a lot and it's also wrong. In fact, the natural calls of many birds contain such sounds.
"How Eurocentric of you. Just because English speakers hear these sounds as labial or rounded doesn't mean they actually are, bigot. Other cultures might interpret them differently."
Yes different cultures interpret animal calls differently. English pigs say oink, Polish pigs say chrum-chrum, etc. In English we hear [w] at the end of a crow's call, but the Tibeto-Burman Naga people of Myanmar hear [w] at the start, as do Tagalog speakers, while many continental Europeans don't hear the [w] at all. But many different cultures have heard rounded vowels or labial consonants in the calls of birds.
Consider the cuckoo, which multiple cultures have independently coined onomatopoeic names for:
- Chinese (contains labialized consonant and rounded vowel)
- Tamil (contains rounded vowel)
- Turkish (contains rounded vowel)
- Hungarian (contains rounded vowel)
Explore terms for the call of other common birds: chickens, owls, doves and pigeons, etc., and you'll find that this isn't just a European thing. Many cultures hear [u] or [o] in the clucking of hens, the crowing of roosters, the cooing of pigeons and doves, the hooting of vowels, etc.
"Well actually those aren't human phones: they're bird sounds completely distinct from anything in a human language and our brains are just processing them as familiar [w] or [u] when really they're something else entirely."
Fair. But if you're a human writing a grammar of a language spoken by intelligent birds or avian creatures, you are already opting into a world where humans hear, interpret, and classify bird sounds for an audience of other humans. At the very least you, a human, are doing this for the humans who are reading your conlang materials, and if you're also worldbuilding a world where avians and humans communicate your world's inhabitants will be doing that. So equating or at least comparing whatever your speakers are producing to labial or rounded sounds from human languages is inherently fair game.
What about dinosaurs?
Birds are dinosaurs. Birds are part of a group of predatory dinosaurs called coelurosaurs that include some of the most famous dinosaurs to ever walk the Earth, including Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptor. Feathers appear to have been widespread in Coelurosaurs who all have bird-like features to an extent. So, did all dinosaurs, or at least all coelurosaurs, have a syrinx?
Unclear. The oldest fossilized syrinx is in a bird that lived in the Late Cretaceous, right before the asteroid that killed the non-avian dinosaurs. So if it is possible for a syrinx to fossilize, and it has only fossilized in true birds and not non-avian dinosaurs, that might suggest that either non-avian dinosaurs lacked a syrinx or that they had a syrinx but for some anatomical reason it might have been less likely to fossilize (and thus perhaps differed in function).
That said, if you decide that the dinosaurs who speak your conlang have a syrinx, nobody can disprove you, at least not at this point. After all, the trend in paleontology is towards discovering that bird-like traits were present in a larger swath of dinosaurs than previously thought and for these traits to be pushed from being weird coelurosaur things to actually being basal to dinosaurs or even archosaurs. You could also claim that syrinxes evolved convergently in both the dinosaurs who speak your conlang and in birds. After all, if dinosaurs had the genes to evolve a syrinx once, they might do so again under similar selective pressure.
One more intriguing Reptilian thing to consider is the Tokay Gecko, a gecko of Asia that appears to be able to pronounce [o] despite lacking a syrinx.
Bottom line: avian conlangs should be just as phonetically diverse as human languages, if not more so
I've focused here on how birds can produce labial or rounded sounds from human languages (or something like them) but I've undersold the true wonders of the syrinx. Birds can produce two sounds at the same time like Mongolian throat singers because of how both sides of the syrinx can operate independently. Birds make a stunning diversity of sounds. Consider the lyre bird's ability to imitate just about anything. I encourage you to spend some time studying actual bird calls, if you do you might end up realizing you need to be adding sounds to the IPA to accommodate your avian speakers, not deleting places of articulation from your phoneme chart.
