The Speakers

Location: Southern Masatoyahi , Beribon (North) and Beribon (South).

Given the tendency of their species towards extreme polyglottism, among the Speakers are found the unquestioned masters of language on Taharjin's Flame. Due to cross-breeding with humans, fewer than half of Speakers nowadays boast the ability to learn new tongues prodigiously, but those that do stand out based on their brilliantly yellow eyes. These are known by the straightforward label “Goldeyes”.

by Midjourney

Speakers are not human, but appear so in nearly all respects: with the exception of eye colour they bear the same bronze skin tone and stand approximately as tall as other Southerners in their region, with an average height of 5'2” for females and 5'4” for males. They are shorter lived than humans, with 60 years considered venerable. Above all it is the ability to learn languages very quickly, and to acquire a great many of them, that truly sets them apart. There is a myth among Speakers that when humans came to their lands long ago, their people had no spoken language whatsoever, but after hearing only a few syllables of the new foreign sounds, they instantly mastered all human tongues. While no Speaker living boasts such legendary talents, it does take only about a month of immersion within a language environment for one to speak a given tongue at near native proficiency.
However, Speakers also constantly pick up new bits of language from each other through conversing in their own tongue, KERIMUTA. Echoing the truth of the above myth, Kerimuta itself does not contain any original linguistic content, but is wholly comprised of human tongues from far and wide which in speech are blended together in a seemingly freeform way. The word KE-RI-MU-TA itself is a distillation of all known languages of the North, South, East, and West into their most frequently heard syllables: KE in the North, RI in the South, MU in the East, and TA in the West, making the effective meaning of the language's name “All Language”. Through speaking Kerimuta, a Goldeye gains considerable knowledge not only of a language's structure, but also its key idioms and in turn, the ideas of its parent culture.
Goldeyes are forever playing language games with each other and are eternally fascinated with both technical and cultural aspects of unfamiliar language systems. This hyper-focused approach to one subject makes them the unquestioned masters of it anywhere in the world, but serves as a downfall as well, as they can become so preoccupied with aspects of speech that other important and obvious things fall by the wayside. A Speaker can easily get so wrapped up in thinking about some peculiar case ending or conjugated form that they forget to look where they're going, and there are numerous jokes about them falling off cliffs while pondering punctuation and the like. They can also be an annoying species to engage because of their constant questions or musings on how someone says a thing, rather than the thing one says. Even so, they have more than proven their worth to humans based on their staggering contributions to the field of linguistics, the modern study of which was formed nearly in its entirety by Uncipa, a luminary of many ages past much honoured by the Speaker tribe. The Speakers' understanding of language and language-like codes also greatly endear them to mages, who employ their talents to help untangle ancient, foreign, or especially complex arcane texts. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, no Speaker yet has been born with the Gift; as a species, Speakers are thus unable to use their often voluminous knowledge of arcane languages to harness the powers they describe.

For further reading on the Speaker's place in the world, see:

Council-Speaker Dynamics and the Liaison role
The Place of Speakers within the Kah