The native speakers are an alien species resembling a sphere with limbs attached. Two arms, bending at the elbows and ending in a pair of hard, bony pincers, are attached to either side of their spherical torso, roughly midway up. A pair of legs are attached to the bottom of the torso, with knees that bend inwards, and ending in bony, toe-less feet. From the back of the torso, behind the legs, sprouts a long, fragile eyestalk, curving upwards along the back and ending in a single eye usually held suspended above the torso. A large mouth opens at the front of the torso, lined with rectangular teeth, and a long, flexible tongue is attached to the back of the oral cavity.
In spite of the obvious differences from human anatomy, the vocal apparatus of the species appears to be quite similar to the human analogue, thus they have comparable means of speech production and communication via language. Their oral cavity fills a significant proportion of their roughly spherical torso, causing their speech sounds to have the flavor of sounds produced in the back portion of the human mouth. Their long tongue lends itself well to trilling sounds, of which two such trills, [r] and [ʀ̥], are used phonemically. Although [ʀ̥] represents an uvular trill in human speech, the native sound is actually produced by the vibration of the back portion of their flexible tongue. However, [ʀ̥] is deemed a sufficiently close approximation.
The fragility of their eyestalk and the strength of their powerful claws gives rise to idioms such as gruŋgemi ipfteku “I'll grab your eye”—considered to be a dire threat often translated as “I'll kill you!”. Their legs are also structured such that sitting is the same as squatting or kneeling, thus giving rise to the verb hlaimi (from hlain, knee) that subsumes all three meanings in human language.