How to report what somebody said in Malayalam — and how the language marks where your information came from, which English handles only clumsily. THE CORE FACT, AND IT IS A BIG ONE English converts speech when it reports it. "He said: I will come" becomes "he said that he would come" — the pronoun shifts from I to he, the tense from will to would. Two separate operations on every sentence you report. Malayalam does not do this. Malayalam quotes directly, and closes the quotation with എന്ന് (ennu). അവൻ ഞാൻ വരും എന്ന് പറഞ്ഞു avan njaan varum ennu paranju word for word: he · I will come · that · said The ഞാൻ (njaan) stays as "I", because you are repeating his words, not rebuilding them from your own viewpoint. Once you stop converting, reported speech becomes easier in Malayalam than in English — and learners keep converting for years. I am Dr. Reshmi R. Nair, an applied linguist from Kerala. I have taught hundreds of learners to speak Malayalam as it is actually spoken. THE QUOTATIVE എന്ന് (ennu) - the particle that closes a quotation പറയുക (parayuka) - to say ചോദിക്കുക (chodikkuka) - to ask പറഞ്ഞു (paranju) - said എന്ന് കേട്ടു (ennu kettu) - I heard that AND THE PART ENGLISH LACKS Malayalam has dedicated ways of marking hearsay — of saying "this is not mine, I am passing it on". English has to reach for "apparently", "supposedly", "I heard", and none of them is grammatical machinery. In Malayalam it is built in, and using it correctly is one of the clearest signals that you have stopped translating. Try it: report something someone told you today, keeping their "I" as "I". Post it below and I will check it. #LearnMalayalam #MalayalamGrammar #Malayalam