Comments on: What is the term for somebody who talks to themself?

Question: What is the term for somebody who talks to themself?

UbuRoivas — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 22:17:53 -0800

What is the term for somebody who talks to themself?

By: Gyan

Gyan — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 22:20:33 -0800

Soliloquist?

By: Juggermatt

Juggermatt — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 22:41:35 -0800

Monologist?

Inner monologist (talks to themselves non vocally)?

Annoying?

By: kyleg

kyleg — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 23:07:06 -0800

Crazy? (In the parlance of our times.)

By: lain

lain — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 23:14:12 -0800

or Schizophrenic

By: jtron

jtron — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 23:20:56 -0800

Autolector?

actually I just made that one up

By: jtron

jtron — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 23:23:56 -0800

I tried looking on Wikipedia but it was all moderation flamewars :(

By: maxpower

maxpower — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 23:30:51 -0800

If I was magically warped into a Seinfeld episode, I'd call someone a 'selftalker'. As to some sort of clinical term...

By: UbuRoivas

UbuRoivas — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 00:39:33 -0800

Gyan may have holed this in one, but I don't want to mark any best answers as yet, in case the suggestions dry up.

My first impulse was "sololocutor", and I used "selftalking" as a tag for the post.

I would have thought that the psychological field might have some specialised term for the act, or for people-who-talk-to-themselves. At the very least, if terms like Weltschmerz or Weltanschauung are kosher in psych, then maybe the Germans have a word like Selbspracher that could be borrowed, because - as we all know - those Germans have a word for everything.

By: Herr Fahrstuhl

Herr Fahrstuhl — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 02:27:46 -0800

Sorry to disappoint, UbuRoivas, but as far as I know (and I am a German native speaker), there is no single word in German for a person talking to herself. There is a word for the act though:Selbstgespräch (literally: self conversation).

By: XiBe

XiBe — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 02:28:23 -0800

Mumblers ?

By: epugachev

epugachev — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 02:42:04 -0800

Autolector?

A lector is a reader. I think you mean autolocutor, which was my first thought, but appears to also be a coinage.

By: vanoakenfold

vanoakenfold — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 03:30:43 -0800

Are you asking for something to call yourself? Because it would be too complicated to even bother with the process of determining whether he was talking to himself or not. I talk out loud when I am alone fairly often, but I am not talking to myself.

By: bleary

bleary — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 04:58:30 -0800

Tom Stoppard gives stark raving sane.

R: "Ah, I think I've got it. A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense, not to himself."

G: "Or just as mad."

R: "Or just as mad."

G: "And he does both."

R: "So there you have it."

G: "Stark raving sane."

By: mdevore

mdevore — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 06:28:08 -0800

The psycholinguistic term? Appears to be a form of the one you knew coming in, "self-talker". Since you already tagged the question self-talking, you probably known some of the background on the research. If not, this seems a good overview on on Piaget, Vygotsky, and others concerning "private speech" or "egocentric speech", as described in children's development, and "self-talking" when describing adult speech.

Unfortunately, most references just talk about those who engage in "self-talking", rather than directly giving them a term. But, there is at least one expert in the field who does use the self-talker term: Erving Goffman. In his book "Forms of Talk" Erving references the term "self-talker" multiple times (according to the ever handy search-inside Amazon feature).

So, if you want to sound like a learned psycholinguist, self-talker sounds like a good bet.

By: mbrubeck

mbrubeck — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 10:02:13 -0800

"idiologue"?

By: petsounds

petsounds — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 10:18:43 -0800

Do I know the term for this? Hmm, I am pretty sure I know it.... or am i? Wait, let me think about it.. now where was the last time I heard of this? think, James, THINK. Wait.. Its on the tip of my tongue. Geeze, what's my problem??