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Oral tradition
Culture preserved and transmitted through speech or song / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Oral tradition, or oral lore, is a form of human communication in which knowledge, art, ideas and culture are received, preserved, and transmitted orally from one generation to another.[1][2][3] The transmission is through speech or song and may include folktales, ballads, chants, prose or poetry. It 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. Religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Catholicism,[4] and Jainism have used oral tradition, in parallel to writing, to transmit their canonical scriptures, rituals, hymns and mythologies.[5][6][7] Sub-Saharan African societies have broadly been labelled as oral civilisations, contrasted with literate civilisations, due to their reverence for the spoken over the written word.[8][9]
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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.[1][10] It may be defined as the recall and transmission of specific, preserved textual and cultural knowledge through vocal utterance.[2][11]
As an academic discipline, oral tradition refers both to objects and methods of study.[12] It is distinct from oral history,[10] which is the recording of personal testimony of those who experienced historical eras or events.[13] 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.[14] Folklore is one, but not the only, type of oral tradition.[15][16]