Language is a skilled activity. In the development and acquisition of the skill, imitation may play different roles. Imitation in language may be related to and throw light on the role and functioning of imitation in other areas including imitation in robotics. The first step is to identify the different ways in which imitation may function in language and speech. There are three principal aspects, the foundational ,the developmental and the social. Considering the developmental first, what part does imitation play in the child’s gradual acquisition of the phonemes, the words and the syntax of its mother language? What light is thrown on this by the pathologies of imitation in language, for example, the echolalia of the autistic child? The foundational aspect relates to evolutionary issues, the origin and diversification of language, lexical and perhaps even syntactic borrowing between languages. How much has imitation to do with the sources of the words we use and the ways those words are put together? The social aspect refers to the significance of imitation for the spread of vocabularies and syntactic forms within language communities. These questions can be considered at different levels, the surface forms of language and speech, the underlying systematicies of language and speech, the problem of speech at the articulatory level and beyond or beneath that the problem of the functioning of imitation at the neural level. Imitation of any kind involves a relation between motor and perceptual functioning, between the motor system of the brain and the visual and other sensory systems. Language and speech also require interaction and coordination between motor activity and perceptual activity. There is also in question the relation between speech and gesture, where gesture lends itself obviously to imitation - and may, quite apart from conventional sign language systems, constitute an apparently independent language system, as demonstrated by the remarkable autonomous development of the Nicaraguan sign-language system by deaf children. These questions on the role and functioning of imitation in language and speech are subjects of study in many different disciplines, not only linguistics proper but also child development, neurology, evolutionary theory, social psychology. Central ideas in this paper are a new emphasis on the bodily basis of language in relation to imitated speech and gesture, and more specifically on cerebral motor organisation as providing a possible new approach to the symbol-grounding problem.

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