About : The Project

Background to the World Oral Literature Project

The World Oral Literature Project is an urgent global initiative to document and make accessible endangered oral literatures before they disappear without record. The project has been established to support local communities and committed fieldworkers engaged in the collection and preservation of all forms of oral literature by providing funding for original research, alongside training in fieldwork and digital archiving methods.

For many communities around the world, the transmission of oral literature from one generation to the next lies at the heart of cultural practice. Oral literature is a broad term which may include performances of ritual texts, curative chants, epic poems, musical genres, folk tales, creation tales, songs, myths, spells, legends, proverbs, riddles, tongue-twisters, word games, recitations, life histories or historical narratives. Most simply, oral literature refers to any form of verbal art which is transmitted orally or delivered by word of mouth. These creative works are increasingly endangered as globalisation and rapid socio-economic change exert complex pressures on smaller communities, often eroding expressive diversity and transforming culture through assimilation to more dominant ways of life. As vehicles for the transmission of unique cultural knowledge, local languages encode oral traditions that become threatened when elders die and livelihoods are disrupted. Of the world’s over 6,000 living languages, around half will cease to be used as spoken vernaculars by the end of this century.

The first phase of the World Oral Literature Project provides small grants to fund the collecting of oral literature, with a particular focus on the peoples of Asia and the Pacific, and on areas of cultural disturbance. In addition, the project will host training workshops for grant recipients. Established at the University of Cambridge in 2009, the project aspires to become a permanent centre for the appreciation and preservation of oral literature and collaborate with local communities to document their own oral narratives. The World Oral Literature Project will also publish a library of oral texts and occasional papers, and make the collections accessible through new media platforms. By stimulating the documentation of oral literature and by building a network for cooperation and collaboration, the World Oral Literature Project will support a community of committed scholars and indigenous researchers.

In many ways, the World Oral Literature Project grew out of the success of the Sabah Oral Literature Project, established in 1986 by Dr G.N. Appell and Laura W. R. Appell to collect, preserve, and translate the oral literature of the various peoples of northern Sabah. The oral literature of the peoples of Sabah contains important knowledge on the environment and its uses, elucidates the nature of the indigenous perceptions of their environment and offers an insight into the human condition during those times in human history when small communities existed on subsistence agriculture and came into conflict with other such societies. Oral literature also has great aesthetic value as it is a fully developed and exciting form of art.