50 Reported Speech: Questions

When we want to report one person’s speech to another person we usually don’t use the exact words. We transform the sentences. It is called Reported Speech.

Questions in Reported Speech don’t have inverted order, we use the normal word order.

• In Reported Speeches subjects don’t come after the verbs like normal questions. Moreover, auxiliary verb is not used in Reported Speech questions;
• Question marks in Reported Speech questions are not used and Yes/No questions are asked with If or Whether;
• When reporting questions we can’t use say or tell but we can present questions with say and tell.
• The form to change the tenses is still the same but when we create questions in Reported Speech we change the sentence from a question sentence to positive sentence.

Direct Speech	Indirect Speech
He asked: “Do you want metallic colour?”	He asked whether I wanted metallic colour.
“Where is the rainbow?”	My little sister asked me where the rainbow was.
“Have you ever met with a perfectionist?”	She asked me that whether I had ever met with a perfectionist.
They asked: “Do we need to wear tie?”	They asked that if they need to wear tie.

When we report a question to somebody else we can use Reported Speech.