The Echoer

At least it beats Starfish Language.

Echo: Hello, traveler. Do you need help with anything?
The Traveler: What are you doing?
Echo: What are you doing?
The Traveler: Stop copying me!
Echo: Stop copying me!
The Traveler: What's your problem?
Echo: What's your problem?

— Genshin Impact

The Echoer is a character who, for some reason, can only speak or mostly speak by copying what other people say. They are not devoid of a capacity to speak entirely. They just speak only when spoken to. When spoken to, they merely repeat what you told them. You tell them "jump", they do not ask "how high?" They just say "jump."

In some circumstances, they are not just limited to repeating any word that is spoken to them at that given time. They could repeat a sentence said to them hours after they hear it when they believe it to be the perfect response to something. They might even be able to pick and choose specific parts of a sentence, constructing their own consonance like auditory Stock Footage.

Whether or not they are fully sentient and are cursed without the capacity to speak for themselves or if they are automatons with no actual wills of their own, programmed to copy whatever they hear, depends on who this trope applies to. When Played for Laughs, then it will devolve into a series of consecutive Stop Copying Me acts. Evil examples may be used as a Mouth of Sauron, repeating word-for-word the orders of their masters and relaying the exact words of the responders back to the Big Bad.

Compare Not in Front of the Parrot!, Parrot Exposition, Repeat to Confirm and Repeat What You Just Said. See also Speaks in Shout-Outs, The Unintelligible, Voice for the Voiceless and The Voiceless. Not to be confused with Power Echoes, when someone's voice has an echo effect, or Answering Echo, when a person is having a conversation with a literal echo.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• In Gakuen Babysitters, Kazuma Mamizuka has the habit of parroting whatever his twin brother Takuma says, since he is much shyer and Prone to Tears, in contrast with Takuma being The Pollyanna.

Animation

• Cubix: Robots for Everyone: For much of the first season, Cubix can only repeat words that others have said.

Comic Strips

• Calvin and Hobbes: In the April 9, 1995 comic, a shapeshifting alien copies Calvin's appearance. Since it doesn't know English, it just copies the few phrases it heard Calvin say: "Grittings. Ma nam is Kahlfin. Heeryor lunboks. Hoffa gud tay askool." But by the end of the day, it's learned enough English to form new sentences. (Or it's Calvin acting up again.)

Fan Works

• Vow of Nudity: Squawk, a minor antagonist encountered in a single story, is a half-witted Kenku cultist who can only repeat the last few words of whatever someone just said to her. Yet somehow she still manages to carry on coherent conversations with different characters about a variety of topics.

Films — Animation

• Steven Universe: The Movie: After being rebooted by Spinel's Rejuvenator, Amethyst reverts back to what she was when she emerged and parrots everything everyone says — and mimics them by shapeshifting, too. She eventually turns back to normal.
• Tarzan: When Tarzan meets Jane for the first time, he repeats everything she says.

Films — Live-Action

• Brazil: One of the plumbers from Central Services only speaks by repeating whatever Bob Hoskins says.
• Kamen Rider × Kamen Rider Fourze & OOO: Movie War Mega Max: Nadeshiko used to only be able to repeat the words being said to her by Gentaro and other people (when she's not being quiet altogether) because she's a SOLU (Seeds Of Life from the Universe), an alien liquid that is not naturally sentient and replication is just its reflex. Gentaro's love for Nadeshiko became a catalyst to have humanity ensue in her, becoming fully sentient and displaying a full range of human emotions and understanding, including non-echo responses.
• Major Payne: the cadet squad leader for the first half of the movie mostly just stands next to Payne and repeats portions of his shouts and insults to the rest of the cadets. Eventually Payne has to tell him to knock it off.
• The Sandlot: Tommy's only opinions in the entire movie are repeats of whatever his older brother Timmy just said.
• Superman: The Movie: After Superman delivers the villainous Lex Luthor and his Bumbling Sidekick Otis to a prison exercise yard, Luthor announces to everyone present that no prison can hold him for long, and... Luthor gets no further, due to Otis echoing his every statement like a loudspeaker on delay. Luthor barks at Otis with an irritated "Will you shut up?!"
• Transformers Film Series: Bumblebee is unable to speak because of a damaged voicebox, he instead communicates by playing back radio clips.

Literature

• Hellspark: A survey team on an alien planet encounter the planet's indigenous humanoids, the Sprookje, who follow the surveyors around and mimic exactly everything they say, but seem either unable or unwilling to say anything for themselves. The driving question of the novel is whether the Sprookje are sapient, which will determine what happens to their planet when the survey is over. It turns out that the Sprookje have their own entirely non-verbal language, and have been carrying on complicated conversations the entire time without any of the surveyors recognising it. Once the protagonist realizes this and starts identifying elements of their language, communication is established and their sapience is quickly put beyond doubt.
• In Starfighters of Adumar, the documentarian of Wedge's diplomatic mission uses a Protocol Droid's head as a recording unit but it ends up damaged to the point that it can only repeat everything it hears. This is used to troll the team's disliked Diplomatic Adviser.
• A Wrinkle in Time: Ms. Who can only speak by quoting other people. She is kind enough to provide proper attribution.

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who: In the Series 4 (the Tenth Doctor) episode "Midnight", the Doctor decide to take a sight-seeing tour alongside a bunch of other tourists. This being a Doctor Who episode, a mysterious alien entity takes possession of one of the tour-guides. The creature does not seem to have a comprehension of human speech and repeat all words that it hears around it with perfect accuracy. After stoking madness and paranoia amongst the passengers, it starts to affect the Doctor, the Doctor becoming the one that is repeating its words.
• Marcus Welby, M.D.: An early episode, "The Foal," involves an autistic boy whose only verbal communication is verbatim repeating what others had just said. Welby and his parents race for ways to help the boy learn to communicate in other ways.
• The Muppet Show: On the rare occasions Beaker is able to say something other than "Meep", it's usually just parroting whatever Bunsen is talking about (example, when Bunsen says to say goodbye to dull bananas, Beaker follows up with "Bye bye!"). In one episode, he also copies a cat's meowing.
• Star Trek: The Original Series: Played with. The episode "Assignment: Earth" has the mysterious Gary Seven conduct a covert operation on Earth during a 1968 orbital platform launch. While at his workstation, a secretary named Roberta walks in. Gary Seven needs to know what happened to two other agents on the same assignment, so he has Roberta sit at a dictation machine: an electric typewriter with a microphone and speech recognition software. When the machine starts typing every word Roberta says, she gets increasingly flustered, and Gary Seven is compelled to switch it off.

Myths & Religion

• Classical Mythology: A mountain nymph named Echo is one of Zeus's many, many consorts. Hera comes to find her with him and after she tries to protect him (on his orders), Hera curses her so that she can only speak words that have been spoken to her. Later on, she becomes infatuated with the vain and cruel Narcissus. The exact details of what happens after differ depending on interpretations (he ends up killing her and Aphrodite curses him to fall in-love with his reflection, he falls in love with his reflection and they both die of a broken heart, etc.), but all versions end with both dying, Echo's voice living on after her death as the origin of the acoustical phenomena of the same name.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Campestris are jolly little Mushroom Men who aren't smart to speak normally, instead they mimic other people's speech — particularly songs. Unfortunately, they're Dreadful Musicians with terrible singing voices and, in early game editions, a tendency to muddle the lyrics of the songs they're repeating ("Murray hada weedleam, hoose fleas was wideasno!").
  • Kenku are Bird People who, beginning in 3rd Edition, were characterized as flightless crow-folk with an uncanny ability to replicate voices and sounds. In early 5th Edition, kenku could only communicate by repeating words or phrases or noises, due to a curse of Creative Sterility that extended to language, but their updated racial rules in Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse relaxed this rule, allowing kenku to speak normally as well as mimic sounds.

Toys

• BIONICLE: The shapeshifting Rahi Krahka initially could only use the words she heard at least once when she first takes a form capable of speaking the Matoran language, as shown when she first encountered Vakama in Nokama's form. She replies to a question with "Not" instead of "No" because Vakama used the former in his question to her, but later is able to string a sentence together ("Well, I would worry") from words Vakama used idly while talking to her. Vakama not knowing of a shapeshifter being present at the time doesn't pick up on her odd speaking pattern at first, more concerned on why she seems so defensive, but then he gets blindsided by her when he suddenly has a vision of her in his form attacking another member of the team. Thanks to her ability to obtain some knowledge from anyone she shapeshifts into, by the time Krahka's had a chance to copy all of the Toa Metru and with some practice she can form sentences perfectly without needing to hear new words, which she puts to good use disguising herself as Whenua and leading them into a trap.

Video Games

• Genshin Impact: Played for Laughs with an NPC literally named Echo, who is one of the Millileth soldiers standing guard at Guili Plains in Liyue. He can only speak by parroting lines verbatim from whoever he speaks to, and constantly gets on his partner Xinghuo's nerves all the time because their conversations amount to nothing but a game of copycat. According to lore, this is because he drank a potion from the Sociopathic Hero Alice in an attempt to fix his original stuttering speech.
• Sonic Battle: Emerl starts out completely silent. After absorbing a chaos emerald, he becomes capable of saying things he has heard, becoming better with each emerald he absorbs. Once he absorbs enough emeralds, he is no longer this trope as he becomes capable of speaking freely.
• Touhou Project: Zigzagged with Kyouko Kasodani. As a yamabiko Youkai, her job is to reflect voices from people and turn them into echoes, but she's more than capable of normal speech as shown in Ten Desires and various side material. That said, her echoing ability has its limits when it comes to math equations. This is because yamabikos are Book Dumb, so if someone shouts a math equation (even something as simple as 1+1), she will not reciprocate it back as an echo.
• Undertale: Echo Flowers are bioluminescent plants that repeat the last sounds they were exposed to, always speech. The protagonist can hear conversations by other people through the flowers.

Webcomics

• Ask White Pearl and Steven (almost!) anything: White Pearl is only able to speak words that Steven has spoken in her vicinity. She is later able to carefully edit her speech and construct sentences all her own. By the end of Season Two, Rose Quartz reveal that this is because White Pearl is acting as an extension of Steven's will.
• The Order of the Stick: This happens when the zombified members of the Draketooth family echo some of the words that are spoken around them (not necessarily to them). When one of them falls in a trap that Vaarsuvius had fallen into previously, V freaks out as the mummy (repeating Nale's previous words) tell "your fault", reinforcing V's guilt that V is responsible for their deaths.

Web Videos

• Critical Role: In Campaign 2, Kiri is a young NPC kenku whom the Mighty Nein rescue from a swamp. Because she is so young, she doesn't write much, so she mostly repeats what the Nein say around her. She gets exposed to a lot of curse words and inappropriate terms that she is apt to repeat at inopportune times, and once repeated some things said in private between Caleb and Nott in front of the rest of the group.
  Jester: If someone asks you what your name is, you say, "I am Kiri."
  Kiri: [mimicking Jester] I am Kiri!
  Jester: And then if they say, "Are you nice?", you say, "Yes, I am very sweet."
  Kiri: Yes, I am very sweet.
  Jester: And if they say something you don't like, you say, "Go FUCK yourself!"
  Kiri: Go FUCK yourself!

Western Animation

• The Amazing World of Gumball: In the episode "The Recipe", Gumball and Darwin discover that the secret to Anton's Resurrective Immortality is that the toaster in his house is able to create new Antons when the dials are arranged in a certain order. After their first attempt to make an Anton gets burned (later coming back as an Evil Twin), Gumball and Darwin create another one, which they dub Ant-Two. Ant-Two is only able to repeat the last few words he hears. It tips Gumball and Darwin off to the fact they accidentally killed the real Anton at the end of the episode.
• Bunnicula: Zigzagged with a Monster of the Week when the titular character and his fellow pets accidentally released a bird that can steal sounds. Among other kinds of sounds, it can steal people's voices and repeat the last words they said in a compilation of all the sounds it acquired until that point.
• Camp Lazlo: Clam often repeats what the person that spoke before him had said but usually just one word. That said, he sometimes speaks for himself.
• Masters of the Universe:
  • He-Man and the Masters of the Universe: Subverted with Hollywog. He is a "bird" (for the Etherians, although he is furry and with bat wings) that repeats whatever other people say, frequently using this to communicate himself. He seems unable to say anything on his own excepting "holy", until near the end, when the Sorceress offers him the chance to be free instead of returning to Beast Man. Surprisingly, Holly speaks with his own voice for the first time: "Do you take me for a dunce? I want to stay with you," making everybody laugh.
  • She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: In the reboot, Imp is a mischievous child-like creature with bat wings that repeats whatever other people say, with their respective voices, but can't speak for himself except squeaking. Hordak keeps him as his pet and a spy, to learn what his subordinates say when he is not around.
• Steven Universe:
  • In the episode "Mirror Gem" in the original show, Lapis Lazuli, trapped within a mirror Pearl found at the Galaxy Warp, is unable to properly communicate. As Steven spends the day with it, she is able to communicate with Steven by repeating everything she sees, eventually being able to edit the "footage" to construct her own sentences.
  • Steven Universe: Future: In the episode "Prickly Pair", Steven grows a cactus that resembles himself and repeats what he says, eventually causing tension when it starts reacting to his stress and anger and repeating hurtful things he said in private while the other Crystal Gems are around.
• Transformers: Prime: Soundwave in the show is portrayed as a mute, only "speaking" by playing back recordings of other Decepticons if he needs to make a point. This is not to say that he is incapable of speech, but he's deliberately chosen not to due to taking a vow of silence.
  Starscream: I have tried every interrogation technique, and nothing is working! I would just eliminate [Arcee and Cliffjumper], but the code they carry is too valuable! If only I could break them open and just take it!
  [Soundwave points to their war-torn planet, Cybertron]
  Starscream: No, I will not take the prisoners to the surface! Why should I let [Shockwave] have all the glory?
  Soundwave: [playing back Starscream's voice] "The code they carry is too valuable!"

Real Life

• There is a real life condition known as Echolalia, wherein a person is only capable of repeating the last few words that they hear.

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