section_path: Abstract
section_name: Abstract
paragraph_text: 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. 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.
  
  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. 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.
  
  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.
  
  As an academic discipline, oral tradition refers both to objects and methods of study. 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. Folklore is one albeit not the only type of oral tradition.
  
  This means of communication has been the most widespread application of human communication for centuries.