Question

Change the following sentence into indirect speech.
He said to me, “Who are you and what do you want”.

Answer 1

Hint: Indirect speech is also known as reported speech and it Is usually used to talk about the past, so we change the tense of the words spoken. Indirect speech does not contain inverted commas. For example: She said to me, “I am writing a novel” – Direct speech; She told me that she is writing a novel – Indirect speech.

Complete answer:
The given statement Is in direct speech: He said to me, “Who are you and what do you want”.
Direct speech is a sentence in which exact spoken words are used in quotation marks or inverted commas. It is directly given in the question that we have to give the indirect speech of the given sentence.
Rules of converting direct speech into indirect speech or reported speech:
1. The simple present tense in the reported speech changes to the simple past tense.
2. The second person in the reported speech changes to the third person.
3. Question mark or exclamation sign or inverted commas used in the direct speech will be removed from the sentence while converting it into indirect speech.
4. When we write indirect speech then ‘THAT’ is used.

Applying these two rules the indirect speech so formed is:
'Who are you' and 'what do you want' change to 'who am I' and 'what I wanted'
Direct speech: He said to me, “Who are you and what do you want”.
Indirect speech: He asked me who I was and what I wanted.

Note: Indirect Speech is used to report something in our own words. The rule for converting direct speech to reported speech is verb + indirect object + to-clause. The indirect object is the person spoken to. Thus, the correct statement is - He asked me who I was and what I wanted.