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Third Person Speech, is it the right term? Anyway, I've seen some characters in the mass media, who talk as if they're talking about other people which are actually nothing but themselves.

Ricka: Ricka wants to wish her friends a Happy New Year.

(Actually) "I want to wish you guys a Happy New Year."

I've always thought that kind of talking skill is to show the characters' personalities where they try to act cute or something, since most of them I've seen were featured in the anime, you know, cute girls doing cute things. So I haven't thought about that there's any one actually would talk like that in English culture even in comics or games. My guess was that it's only the matter of translations: They didn't have any choice but to translate them like those to avoid killing the original materials' sense.

But I found out recently, in a game, Fallout: New Vegas, that there's this character, named Santiago, who talks just like them.

Santiago: It is a dream come true. Santiago never thought he could work in such a wonderous den of vice and iniquity.

But he is a guy, and to my surprises, he is considered as a suave talker to the point where the player can recruit him as a male prostitute to a bar.


  1. Do they really exist, who talk like that in real life?

  2. What do natives feel when hearing that kind of speeches?

2 Answers 2

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What you're referring to is called illeism.

Illeism

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It is not "normal" instead it is highly "marked". People don't talk like that in reality, except as a joke or to sound "odd".

It might be done to sound cute, as young children sometimes talk this way. Or it might be done to sound foreign. Santiago in the game pretends to have a Spanish accent to get out of paying for drinks. It is likely that referring to himself in the third person is part of pretending to have a foreign accent.

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