Canine Speech

[Arcbound Phyrexian]

I just started writing for a gnoll in my WIP, but his dialogue feels off. It's correct. I feel like a primitive canine race would have some sort of dialect, or speech impediment. How would you show canid nature trough speech?

Bonus: What about other races and/or cultures? Might as well make a useful discussion out of it.

 

[Johnny Cosmo]

I guess the tone of speech and the manner in which the dialogue is spoken would be more important than the dialect or accent. Otherwise, I'm unsure. An easy option would be to use 'barked', 'growled', 'snapped', and 'snarled' as dialogue tags, but I know many people get tired of them quickly.

 

[Devor]

I've seen snakes which used to ". . . *hiss* . . . " in the middle of the dialogue or ssstring out their S. If their dialogue is sparse and meaningful it can be effective, but as the characters start to speak at length I think it can get old pretty fast.

If you want a canine feel, especially for a Hyena/Gnoll, the first thing I would say is to use short, snapp-ish sentences, like they don't like talking and are constantly upset with you. Also you should remember to try wikipedia as a reference for literally anything. Go to the page on "barking" and you will find useful tidbits. For instance, wolves only tend to bark or growl as a warning, and the domesticated dog is the only animal to specifically bark for some of the more "human" reasons of excitement or happiness.

 

[Arcbound Phyrexian]

Short sentences is a good idea. I've already been trying to keep his lines simple and, at times, uninformed. Lots of questions and musings, not a whole lot of confidence in his knowledge.

 

[The Blue Lotus]

I have no idea if this will help you or not, but...
In my series I have a talking bird, not a bird like a real one but a mythological one I used turns of phrase like the creatues squeaky voice, and he finished with a squawk.
I also use onomatopeia in some instances for example "Rawwk, the one that thee shall mate is he whom is always late! Rawwk."

 

[Ravana]

Without going into the full details of an answer (I will if you want: ask)… sounds are created in the human mouth through varying combinations of four things: (1) the position (or movement) of the tongue; (2) the position of the lips; (3) vibration of the vocal cords; (4) whether or not some of the air is sent through the nasal passages. (Actually, there's a fifth, which is whether or not the air is passing out of the mouth or entering it, but the latter is nonexistent in English and rare in general.)

So basically there are two ways to answer your question: either do the necessary research to determine the configuration of the vocal tract for whatever species it is you want to work with; or, if you aren't going to do this, don't bother making "changes" at all, as you aren't going to "get it right" anyway. Just say they talk with accents, and let the reader do the rest in his mind.

For gnolls specifically: realize that these are entirely derived from D&D. (And didn't become canids until AD&D; prior to that they were "a cross between gnomes and trolls.") So if you want to know how they talk, I'd look at source materials from the game.

Barring that, you'll have to decide how much their mouths resemble that of dogs… which doesn't have to be a whole lot, especially on the inside. Dogs don't have much in the way of lips, so sounds like /b/ and /p/ would probably be impossible for them, others involving lips may be difficult or come out "accented." The tongue doesn't have the same muscle structure, so a great many other sounds might be difficult or impossible, especially those made with the tip. (You ever see "talking" dogs? You ever hear any of them make an /l/ sound?) Voicing and nasalization are no problem. But that's for dogs: the structure of gnoll mouths, particularly as involves tongue movement, could be completely different, and there's no reason their lips couldn't be better developed.

(If you want something that's at least simple and consistent–if perhaps limited in overall accuracy–replace all /b/ sounds with /v/, replace /p/ with /f/, replace /w/ with either /v/ or /oo/ (a howl-like approximation), depending on which sounds closer to the original word… and stop there. Most people will never notice that there probably ought to be more involved.)