A quotative is grammatical device to mark reported speech in some language

Language

Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...

s. It can be equated with "spoken quotation mark

Quotation mark

Quotation marks or inverted commas are punctuation marks at the beginning and end of a quotation, direct speech, literal title or name. Quotation marks can also be used to indicate a different meaning of a word or phrase than the one typically associated with it and are often used to express irony...

s". In the English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 sentence

(1) John said "Wow,"

there is no word indicating that we are dealing with reported speech. This is only indicated typographically

Typography

Typography is the art and technique of arranging type in order to make language visible. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading , adjusting the spaces between groups of letters and adjusting the space between pairs of letters...

. In Sinhala on the other hand, the equivalent sentence

(2) John Wow kiyalaa kivvaa

has an overt indication of reported speech after the reported string Wow, the quotative kiyalaa.

In Japanese

Japanese language

is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

, the quotative と [to] (colloquially って [tte]) is used to indicate reported speech in this sentence

(3) 石田さん は 「トマトが好きじゃない」 と 言いました。
Ishida-san ha [wa] "tomato ga suki janai" to iimashita.
Mr. Ishida top. "tomato-nom like-neg" quot. say-past-polite

"Mr. Ishida said that he didn't like tomatoes"

See Japanese Grammar

Japanese grammar

The Japanese language has a regular agglutinative verb morphology, with both productive and fixed elements. In language typology, it has many features divergent from most European languages. Its phrases are exclusively head-final and compound sentences are exclusively left-branching. There are many...

 for more examples of when と (to) is used.

In English, the phrase be

Indo-European copula

A feature common to all Indo-European languages is the presence of a verb corresponding to the English verb to be. Though in some languages, such as Russian, it is vestigial, it is present nonetheless in atrophied forms or derivatives.-General features:...

 like

Like

In the English language, the word like has a very flexible range of uses, ranging from conventional to non-standard. It can be used as a noun, verb, adverb, adjective, preposition, particle, conjunction, hedge, interjection, and quotative....

can be used as a quotative.

(4) John was like, wow.