って

[Rei Yahya]

I want to hear what more experienced people in Japanese have to say about って. The impression I get is that it largely revolves around forms of hearsay in a way.

Example sentence from a particle dictionary:
お父さんがね、私の作ったお料理とってもおいしかったって。
Father said that the meal I cooked was very good.

This isn't the only usage I'm aware of (in fact, there are 6 more in the particle dictionary), but how would someone who knows Japanese better explain it?

(Also, I did see some text in which a character started a conversation with って. What would that imply?)

Thank you very much!

 

[Mike Cash]

The example you quoted is merely a colloquial contraction of と言った. It is quite common, although sometimes it is used for a different tense, such as と言う

 

[Toritoribe]

That's more likely quotation than hearsay, like と as Mike-san wrote.

It's also the same to って at the beginning of a sentence. For instance, って言うか is used in colloquial expressions to deny the words of the person you are talking with, as a kind of interjection just like "or rather".