How to use Indirect Questions

Learn about Indirect Questions in English grammar. Clear and simple explanation of meaning and use, with examples.

Keith Taylor Updated 14 June, 2024

Using Indirect Questions

In some contexts, a direct question is too abrupt or impolite. Imagine sitting at a bus stop with your friend and a stranger. You want to know what time the next bus will leave. Here are two ways you can ask:

What time’s the next bus? (direct question)
Excuse me, could you tell me what time the next bus leaves? (indirect question)

The direct question would be a normal and appropriate question to ask your friend. But if you asked the direct question to the stranger, she would probably consider you impolite. It would be more polite to use the indirect question with the stranger.

Forming Indirect Questions

Indirect questions start with phrases like “Can you tell me…?”, “Do you know…?” and “I wonder if…?”.
- Can you tell me what you are doing?
- Do you know whether it’s going to rain tomorrow?
When we form an indirect question the word order in the question itself doesn’t change . So we don’t invert the subject and auxiliary verb like we do in a direct question: The word order is the same as in an affirmative statement.
- What is he doing? (direct question – subject and auxiliary inverted)
  Do you know what he is doing? (indirect question – subject and auxiliary not inverted)
- What time will the train leave? (direct question)
  Could you tell me what time the train will leave? (indirect question)
If the direct question contains the auxiliary “do” (or “does” or “did”), we omit it in the indirect question…
- What do you want? (direct question)
  Can you tell me what you want? (indirect question)
- When did she leave? (direct question)
  Would you happen to know when she left? (indirect question)

…and the main verb doesn’t return to the base form.

What time did the train leave? (direct question)
Could you tell me what time the train left? (indirect question)

Have you seen my dog? (direct question)
Indirect question: Could you tell me if you have seen my dog? (indirect question)

Related grammar points

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Keith Taylor

Keith is the co-founder of Eslbase and School of TEFL. He's been a teacher and teacher trainer for over 20 years, in Indonesia, Australia, Morocco, Spain, Italy, Poland, France and now in the UK.

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3 comments

Ben

I present this as ‘polite commands’. Rude: Tell me what time it is!
Polite: I was wondering if you could tell me what time it is? Rude: Give me a pen!
Polite: Could you give me a pen? Rude: Move!
Polite: Would you be able to move, please? So lesson is: 1) be rude, 2) what can we say to be polite (Could you…, I was wondering if…?) 3) now put them together – but DO NOT change the word order of the rude command. Getting students to transform real questions into indirect questions is very confusing for them – and artificial since the basic underlying sentence is a command, not a question. As such, it does not change. It’s best to teach this in isolation from indirect speech since syntactically they are actually completely different things.

Prasoon

Has the train left?

Keith Taylor

Hi Prasoon If you want to ask this with an indirect question, you can say something like: “Could you tell me if the train has left?” I hope that helps!

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