The article discusses the jako recitativum, which is a phenomenon linked mainly to reported speech in Old Church Slavic and Old East Slavic. For this purpose, a general outline of the research history on recitativa is first traced. Starting from work on the Biblical Hebrew kî recitativum in the late 19th century, with its roots in exegetic studies, and including work on the (Biblical) Greek ὅτι recitativum, the outline …