Oral tradition, or oral lore, is a form of human communication in which knowledge, art, beliefs, ideas and culture are received, preserved, and transmitted orally from one generation to another.Vansina, Jan: Oral Tradition as History (1985), reported statements from present generation which "specifies that the message must be oral statements spoken, sung or called out on musical instruments only"; "There must be transmission by word of mouth over at least a generation". He points out, "Our definition is a working definition for the use of historians. Sociologists, linguists or scholars of the verbal arts propose their own, which in, e.g., sociology, stresses common knowledge. In linguistics, features that distinguish the language from common dialogue (linguists), and in the verbal arts features of form and content that define art (folklorists)."Ki-Zerbo, Joseph: "Methodology and African Pre-history", 1990, UNESCO International Scientific Committee for the Drafting of a General History of Africa; James Currey Publishers, , 9780852550915; see Ch. 7; "Oral tradition and its methodology" at pages 54–61; at page 54: "Oral tradition may be defined as being a testimony transmitted verbally from one generation to another. Its special characteristics are that it is verbal and the manner in which it is transmitted." The transmission is through speech or song and may include folktales, ballads, chants, prose or poetry. The information is mentally recorded by oral repositories, sometimes termed "walking libraries", who are usually also performers. Oral tradition is a medium of communication for a society to transmit oral history, oral literature, oral law and other knowledge across generations without a writing system, or in parallel to a writing system. It is the most widespread medium of human communication. They often remain in use in the modern era throughout for cultural preservation.
Religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Catholicism, and Jainism have used oral tradition, in parallel to writing, to transmit their canonical scriptures, rituals, hymns and mythologies. African societies have broadly been labelled oral civilisations, contrasted with literate civilisations, due to their reverence for the oral word and widespread use of oral tradition.
Oral tradition is memories, knowledge, and expression held in common by a group over many generations: it is the long preservation of immediate or contemporaneous testimony. It may be defined as the recall and transmission of specific, preserved textual and cultural knowledge through vocal utterance.Oral Tradition , Encyclopædia Britannica, John Miles Foley Oral tradition is usually popular, and can be exoteric or esoteric. It speaks to people according to their understanding, unveiling itself in accordance with their aptitudes.
As an academic discipline, oral tradition refers both to objects and methods of study.Dundes, Alan, "Editor's Introduction" to The Theory of Oral Composition, John Miles Foley. Bloomington, IUP, 1988, pp. ix–xii It is distinct from oral history, which is the recording of personal testimony of those who experienced historical eras or events. Oral tradition is also distinct from the study of orality, defined as thought and its verbal expression in societies where the technologies of literacy (writing and print) are unfamiliar.Ong, Walter, S.J., Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982, p. 12. Folklore is one albeit not the only type of oral tradition.Degh, Linda. American Folklore and the Mass Media. Bloomington: IUP, 1994, p. 31Folklore in the Oral Tradition, Fairytales, Fables and Folk-legend , Julie Carthy (1984), The Oral Tradition, Volume IV, Yale University, Quote: "Folklore is said to be in the oral tradition. Dundes states that the most common criterion for a definition of folklore is its means of transmission that is, orally. He clarifies however that materials other than folklore are also orally conveyed. Therefore oral transmission itself is not sufficient to distinguish folklore from non-folklore."
History According to John Foley, oral tradition has been an ancient human tradition found in "all corners of the world". Modern archaeology has been unveiling evidence of the human efforts to preserve and transmit arts and knowledge that depended completely or partially on an oral tradition, across various cultures:
Before the introduction of text, oral tradition remained the only means of communication in order to establish societies as well as its institutions. Despite widespread comprehension of literacy in the recent century, oral tradition remains the dominant communicative means within the world.
Africa
In Africa, the oral tradition includes proverbs, folktales, songs, dances, customs, traditional medicine, religious practices, and cultural sayings that are told and expressed to teach lessons about life, social systems, religion, and spirituality. All indigenous African societies use oral tradition to learn their origin and history, civic and religious duties, crafts and skills, as well as traditional myths and legends. It is also a key socio-cultural component in the practice of their traditional spiritualities, as well as mainstream Abrahamic religions. Jan Vansina differentiates between oral and literate civilisations, stating: "The attitude of members of an oral society toward speech is similar to the reverence members of a literate society attach to the written word. If it is hallowed by authority or antiquity, the word will be treasured." For centuries in Europe, all data felt to be important were written down, with the most important texts prioritised, such as Bible, and only trivia, such as song, legend, anecdote, and proverbs remained unrecorded. In Africa, all the principal political, legal, social, and religious texts were transmitted orally. When the Bamums in Cameroon invented a script, the first to be written down was the royal chronicle and the code of customary law. Most African courts had archivists who learnt by heart the royal genealogy and history of the state, and served as its unwritten constitution.
The performance of a tradition is accentuated and rendered alive by various gesture, social conventions and the unique occasion in which it is performed. Furthermore, the climate in which traditions are told influences its content. In Burundi, traditions were short because most were told at informal gatherings and everyone had to have their turn; in neighbouring Rwanda, many narratives were longer because a one-man professional had to entertain his patron for a whole evening, with every production checked by fellow specialists and errors punishable. Frequently, glosses or commentaries were presented parallel to the narrative, sometimes answering questions from the audience to ensure understanding, although often someone would learn a tradition without asking their master questions and not really understand the meaning of its content, leading them to speculate in the commentary. Oral traditions only exist when they are told, except for in people's minds, and so the frequency of telling a tradition aids its preservation. These African ethnic groups also utilize oral tradition to develop and train the human intellect, and the memory to retain information and sharpen imagination.
West Africa
Perhaps the most famous repository of oral tradition is the west African griot (named differently in different languages). The griot is a hereditary position and exists in Dyula, Soninke, Fula, Hausa, Songhai, Wolof, Serer, and Mossi societies among many others, although more famously in Mandinka society. They constitute a caste and perform a range of roles, including as a historian or library, musician, poet, mediator of family and tribal disputes, spokesperson, and served in the king's court, not dissimilar from the European bard. They keep records of all births, death, and marriages through the generations of the village or family. When Sundiata Keita founded the Mali Empire, he was offered Balla Fasséké as his griot to advise him during his reign, giving rise to the Kouyate line of griots. Griots often accompany their telling of oral tradition with a musical instrument, as the Epic of Sundiata is accompanied by the balafon, or as the kora accompanies other traditions. In modern times, some griots and descendants of griots have dropped their historian role and focus on music, with many finding success, however many still maintain their traditional roles.
East Africa
Kenya safeguarded its oral tradition by ratifying the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in October 2007.
North Africa
Central Africa
Southern Africa
Europe Albania
Albanian traditions have been handed down orally across generations.; ; ; . They have been preserved through traditional memory systems that have survived intact into modern times in Albania, a phenomenon that is explained by the lack of state formation among Albanians and their ancestors – the Illyrians, being able to preserve their "tribally" organized society. This distinguished them from civilizations such as Ancient Egypt, Minoans and Mycenaeans, who underwent state formation and disrupted their traditional memory practices.
Albanian epic poetry has been analysed by Homeric scholars to acquire a better understanding of Homeric epics. The long oral tradition that has sustained Albanian epic poetry reinforces the idea that pre-Homeric epic poetry was oral. The theory of oral-formulaic composition was developed also through the scholarly study of Albanian epic verse. The Albanian traditional singing of epic verse from memory is one of the last survivors of its kind in modern Europe,. and the last survivor of the Balkan traditions..
Ancient Greece
"All ancient Greek literature", states Steve Reece, "was to some degree oral in nature, and the earliest literature was completely so".Reece, Steve. "Orality and Literacy: Ancient Greek Literature as Oral Literature", in David Schenker and Martin Hose (eds.), Companion to Greek Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2015) 43-57. . Homer's epic poetry, states Michael Gagarin, "was largely composed, performed and transmitted orally". As folklores and legends were performed in front of distant audiences, the singers would substitute the names in the stories with local characters or rulers to give the stories a local flavor and thus connect with the audience, but making the historicity embedded in the oral tradition unreliable. The lack of surviving texts about the Greek and Roman religious traditions have led scholars to presume that these were ritualistic and transmitted as oral traditions, but some scholars disagree that the complex rituals in the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations were an exclusive product of an oral tradition.
Ireland An Irish seanchaí (plural: seanchaithe), meaning bearer of "old lore", was a traditional Irish language storyteller (the Scottish Gaelic equivalent being the seanchaidh, anglicised as shanachie). The job of a seanchaí was to serve the head of a lineage by passing information orally from one generation to the next about Irish folklore and history, particularly in medieval times.
Rome