Radical 149 or radical speech (言部) meaning "speech" is one of the 20 Kangxi radicals (214 radicals in total) composed of 7 strokes.

In the Kangxi Dictionary, there are 861 characters (out of 49,030) to be found under this radical.

言 is also the 166th indexing component in the Table of Indexing Chinese Character Components predominantly adopted by Simplified Chinese dictionaries published in mainland China, with the simplified component form 讠 listed as its associated indexing component.

• Oracle bone script character
• Bronze script character
• Large seal script character
• Small seal script character

The first stroke of this radical character is printed differently in different languages, while in writing, the slant dot form is overwhelmingly preferred.

In addition, when used as a left component, this character is simplified as 讠 in Simplified Chinese.

The radical is also used as an independent Chinese character. It is one of the Kyōiku kanji or Kanji taught in elementary school in Japan.^[1] It is a second grade kanji^[1]