m. c. de marco: To invent new life and new civilizations...

The SFWA blog begins a series on how linguistics can help you by Juliette Wade with how articulatory phonetics can help you:

I had an alien with a long muzzle and tongue, so I decided that there were a lot of different kinds of “l” and “r” sounds in this language. In English I decided to use single “l” versus double “ll” and single “r” versus double “rr” to indicate these sounds, even though I didn’t know exactly what they sounded like. I also decided to avoid all unvoiced consonants – mostly for the sake of argument, and for giving the language a distinctive “feel.” That means plenty of m/n/d/g/b/v, etc., but no p/t/k/s/f.