This study focuses on the features of the semantic shift ‘speak’ – ‘indicate’ in Slavic and Germanic languages. This shift enables the verbs of speech to take a non-agent subject, as in the sentence This faсt tells about many things. In Slavic and Germanic languages this semantic shift is accompanied by another type of metaphorical use of the verbs of speech extension in the lexical domain of speech act verbs, which enables the verb to take such a non-agent subject
that associates with a certain agent one, i.e., the author of the text, as in All the newspapers were talking about this event. As a whole, the semantic shift ‘speak’ – ‘indicate’ is typical both of Slavic and Germanic languages, but its realization in these languages exhibits certain peculiarities,
which are investigated in this paper. The mutual influence of semantic systems of cognate languages is also under study in this paper.