Direct and Indirect speech are both used by speaker or writer to describe, report or quote speech of other person. This person is usually mentioned in author's clause.

Direct speech is used to represent the speech of other person exactly with the same words as they were, with all errors and phonetical . Direct speech is not a member of complex sentence, but individual words may be syntactically analyzed within the direct speech.

In latin-based scripts the direct speech is put between quotation marks: “direct speech”. However genuine Tolkien's scripts Tengwar and Cirth lack such punctuation marks (regular european quotes are used). Tengwar¹⁾ has some punctuation marks resembling quotes «8qpEjL» – but it seems they represent parentheses.

Usually the term quote is used synonymously with direct speech but it is not always so. Quote may belong to member of sentence:

In this example with “Ash nazg” is an adverbial of verb starts and is not a direct speech.

Indirect speech is used to represent the speech of other person in speaker's words. It is usually introduced by relative conjunction “that” = “zamash”. Author's speech is introductionary clause of the sentence. Inside indirect speech personal pronouns are usually transformed from 1st or 2nd person into 3rd person. However if person who was addressee of direct speech in 3rd person becomes a listener of indirect speech, he will be mentioned in 2nd person.

There is no special rules of tense agreement in Nûrlâm when using direct or indirect speech.