Oral tradition, or oral lore, is a form of human communication wherein knowledge, art, ideas and cultural material is received, preserved, and transmitted orally from one generation to another. The transmission is through speech or song and may include folktales, ballads, chants, prose or verses. In this way, it is possible 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. Religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Catholicism, and Jainism, for example, have used an oral tradition, in parallel to a writing system, to transmit their canonical scriptures, rituals, hymns and mythologies from one generation to the next.
Oral tradition is information, memories, and knowledge held in common by a group of people, over many generations; it is not the same as testimony or oral history. In a general sense, "oral tradition" refers to the recall and transmission of a specific, preserved textual and cultural knowledge through vocal utterance. As an academic discipline, it refers both to a set of objects of study and the method by which they are studied.
Transmission
Oral traditions face the challenge of accurate transmission and verifiability of the accurate version, particularly when the culture lacks written language or has limited access to writing tools. Oral cultures have employed various strategies that achieve this without writing. For example, a heavily rhythmic speech filled with mnemonic devices enhances memory and recall. A few useful mnemonic devices include alliteration, repetition, assonance, and proverbial sayings. In addition, the verse is often metrically composed with an exact number of syllables or morae – such as with Greek and Latin prosody and in Chandas found in Hindu and Buddhist texts. The verses of the epic or text are typically designed wherein the long and short syllables are repeated by certain rules, so that if an error or inadvertent change is made, an internal examination of the verse reveals the problem. Oral traditions can be passed on through plays and acting, as shown in modern-day Cameroon by the Graffis or Grasslanders who perform and deliver speeches to teach their history through oral tradition. Such strategies facilitate transmission of information without a written intermediate, and they can also be applied to oral governance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_tradition
The oral traditions and expressions domain encompasses an enormous variety of spoken forms including proverbs, riddles, tales, nursery rhymes, legends, myths, epic songs and poems, charms, prayers, chants, songs, dramatic performances and more. Oral traditions and expressions are used to pass on knowledge, cultural and social values and collective memory. They play a crucial part in keeping cultures alive.
Some types of oral expression are common and can be used by entire communities while others are limited to particular social groups, only men or women, perhaps, or only the elderly. In many societies, performing oral traditions is a highly specialized occupation and the community holds professional performers in the highest regard as guardians of collective memory. Such performers can be found in communities all over the world. While poets and storytellers in non-Western societies such as the griots and dyelli from Africa are well known, there is also a rich oral tradition in Europe and North America. In Germany and the USA, for example, there are hundreds of professional storytellers.
Because they are passed on by word of mouth, oral traditions and expressions often vary significantly in their telling. Stories are a combination – differing from genre to genre, from context to context and from performer to performer – of reproduction, improvisation and creation. This combination makes them a vibrant and colourful form of expression, but also fragile, as their viability depends on an uninterrupted chain passing traditions from one generation of performers to the next.
https://ich.unesco.org/en/oral-traditions-and-expressions-00053
Oral Tradition, also called orality, the first and still most widespread mode of human communication. Far more than “just talking,” oral tradition refers to a dynamic and highly diverse oral-aural medium for evolving, storing, and transmitting knowledge, art, and ideas. It is typically contrasted with literacy, with which it can and does interact in myriad ways, and also with literature, which it dwarfs in size, diversity, and social function.
The primacy of oral tradition
For millennia prior to the invention of writing, which is a very recent phenomenon in the history of humankind, oral tradition served as the sole means of communication available for forming and maintaining societies and their institutions. Moreover, numerous studies—conducted on six continents—have illustrated that oral tradition remains the dominant mode of communication in the 21st century, despite increasing rates of literacy.
Diversity, shared features, and functionality
Notwithstanding their tremendous diversity, oral traditions share certain characteristics across time and space. Most notably, they are rule-governed. They use special languages and performance arenas while employing flexible patterns and structures that aid composition, retention, and reperformance. In addition, they assume an active role for the audience and fulfill a clear and important function for the societies that maintain them. Perhaps counterintuitively, oral traditions also embody an expressive power that derives from their ability to vary within these limitations as they respond to different performance settings and circumstances.
These core aspects of oral tradition are by no means limited to peoples of the past. Rather, they abound in contemporary cultures. In Australia some of the Aboriginal peoples navigate their territory through series of short songs popularly known as songlines. In addressing a network of both mythical and tangible landmarks, the songlines together constitute a catalogue of local route systems—in essence, a map delineating the geographical, spiritual, social, and historical contour, of their environment. South African praise-singers harness a uniquely effective publication and distribution system when they create orally performed résumés for tribal chiefs and when they praise or criticize public figures such as Nelson Mandela. Native American peoples such as the Zuni recount tales that portray approved as opposed to objectionable social behaviour or that explain the origins of natural phenomena. History, religion, and ritual merge in major, multimedia oral events (e.g., those involving mixtures of storytelling, song, and movement), such as the Mwindo epic of the Nyanga people in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo or the Tulu-language Siri epic of southern India. Brazilian cordel ballads—the small printed folios of stories, often strung up on a string for sale and sung by their sellers—whose roots go back to European sources, demonstrate rich combinations of tradition and innovation in oral performance; they show how a rule-governed process generates linked variants. In northern Albania, moreover, oral tradition was the repository of the secular law code for more than 500 years before the law was committed to paper in the 20th century.
Thriving oral genres in the Pacific Islands include protest songs, spirit narratives, love songs, clan traditions, laments, and dance-dramas. The Basque poets of southern France and northern Spain use their improvisational contest poetry, called bertsolaritza, not merely to entertain but to discuss cultural, linguistic, and political problems. Local performances number in the thousands, and every four years selection of a national champion is made before an audience of thousands and is broadcast on live television to many more. Women in a host of South Asian cultures employ oral traditions to explore the ambiguities of gender, ideology, and identity within their complex communities. For example, in Kangra, a town in Himachal Pradesh, northwestern India, older women sing a type of song known as pakhaṛu to contemplate and comment on the hardships of married life. Meanwhile, the long stories of Manas and Jangar, performed by nonliterate bards in versions reaching more than 200,000 lines, traverse multiple languages and cultures across north-central Asia. In the United States, folk preachers use oral tradition to extrapolate stories based on biblical accounts; hip-hop and rap artists improvise socially coded poetry along familiar rhythmic and rhyming patterns; and in so-called slam poetry competitions, contestants are awarded points equally for their poems and for their oral performance of them.
Lasting significance
Oral tradition represents a vital and multifunctional means of verbal communication that supports diverse activities in diverse cultures. As humankind’s first and still most ubiquitous mode of communication, it bears a striking resemblance to one of the newest communication technologies, the Internet. Like oral tradition, the Internet works by varying within limits, as when software architects use specialized language to craft Web sites or when a user’s clicking on a link opens up multiple (but not an infinite group of) connections. Both the Internet and oral tradition operate via navigation through webs of options; both depend upon multiple, distributed authorship; both work through rule-governed processes rather than fossilized texts; and both ultimately derive their strength from their ability to change and adapt.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/oral-tradition
Oral tradition, often thought of as verbal storytelling, takes many forms from folk singing to poetry to lecturing, all based solely on non-written conversation and memory. Oral tradition is similar to the oral histories archives like our holdings in our collections, though without needing to be recorded. Additionally, oral traditions encompass countless generations and pieces of knowledge, not simply that which is relevant to the individual’s personal history, as is the case with oral histories.
While often associated with indigenous American communities who have entire ceremonies dedicated to the transfer of knowledge, stories, and traditions, many societies across the world relied on oral tradition historically, such as the ancient Vedic South Asians, indigenous Australians, West African kingdoms, Central Asian tribes, and others.
Importance of the Oral Tradition - Before the gospels were composed, Jesus'
first followers sustained his memory by sharing stories of his life, death
and teachings.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/story/oral.html
https://reknew.org/2021/11/how-reliable-was-the-early-churchs-oral-traditions/
