Reflexivity and Language: from Mead to Wiley - The author studies the process involved in the emergence of the reflexive self through the use of significant symbols (pre-linguistic-gestural and linguistic-verbal) by means of a critical comparison with Mead and the legacy he left to contemporary sociologists (in particular Jürgen Jabermas, Randall Collins, Margaret Archer and Nobert Wiley). The reflexive-semiotic self is analysed by combining Mead’s I-Me and Peirce’s I-You models into an I-You-Me triadic model. Particular attention is paid to an issue that has been neglected in social theory until now: the language of interior conversation, that does not qualify as a public language, though it has a distinct structural profile. This inner speech is presented as a sort of personalised «dialect» in which syntax is abbreviated and signs, only partially verbal, are often tied to a sensory imagery. Its semantic privacy does not prevent one from making it public, at least to some extent, and to use it for research purpose.