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43 44

B e t w e e n  O r a l  a n d  W r i t t e n  L i t e r a r y  F o r m s : 
(Re)Understanding the Dichotomy

Dele Maxwell Ugwanyi
Department of English and Literary Studies

Enugu State University of Science and Technology,
Enugu

&
Richard Ifeanyichukwu Nnamani

Department of English and Literary Studies
Enugu State University of Science and Technology,

 Enugu

Abstract
Arguments about the contradiction of oral and written forms of 
work of art generally known as literature have been posited by 
many scholars. However, there are hardly studies on what 
primarily constitutes oral literature and the correctness and 
appropriateness of the phrase and the literariness of those 
constituents. The seeming negligence on this critical perspective 
may be motivated by the fact that folklore, orality and oral heritage 
are mistaken to mean oral literature by many scholars which is an 
obvious misconception of the discipline. Even though early 
researchers on the field of oral literature were not literary scholars, 
it is pertinent that the misconception about the field is corrected 
and the record set straight. This paper, therefore, concerns itself 
with proper categorisation of what oral literature is not with keen 
conceptualisation of the literariness of what constitutes oral 
literature; attempt is also made to invite scholars to a consideration 
of a universalised categorization of genres of African oral 
literature. Drawing insights from classical literary theories and 
hermeneutics, the core of oral literature is established thereby 
filtering out what were hitherto mistaken to be oral literature. 
Fur thermore ,  ora l  l i te ra ture  i s  cont ras ted  wi th  i t s 

Patrick, Charles Alex. “The Role of Anxiety and Anger in Wole 
Soyinka's Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known.” 
IAFOR Journal of Arts and Humanities, vol. 6, Issue 2, 
November 2019, pp. 93 – 101.

Soyinka, Wole. A Shuttle in the Crypt.Methuen, 1971.

--- Idanre and Other Poems.Methuen, 1967.

--- Madmen and Specialists. University Press Limited, 1971.

---Mandela's Earth and Other Poems.Random House, 1988.

---Ogun Abibiman. Rex Collins, 1978.

--- Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known.Methuen, 2002.
Wilson, Roderick. “Complexity and Confusion in Soyinka's 

Shorter Poetry”, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 
vol 8, no 1, 1973, pp. 69.

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45 46

writtencounterpart to critically establish that the only difference is 
that the former is transmitted by “word of mouth” while the latter 
is written.
Keywords: literariness, folklore, orality, oral heritage, orature 
and oral literature

Introduction
In discussing what oral literature is not and to put more 

succinctly, the many misconceptions about oral literature and the 
inherent contradictions often associated with classification of oral 
and written forms, attempt is made to bring our understanding to 
the etymology of the phrase 'oral literature'. Some scholars and 
students alike use folklore and orality interchangeably with oral 
literature. These scholars assume both terms to be conceptual 
synonyms. Those scholars who perceive these terms as the same 
may have got their orientation of oral literature from early 
researchers who were not literary scholars.While they are not 
entirely wrong for using these two terms to mean the same thing, it 
is important that we clarify these misconceptions by dissecting 
these words from the general to the specific. To do this, let us look 
at instances from the critics that have used this term 
interchangeably and the contexts in which they have used it. For 
instance, F.B.O. Akporobaro (2012) is one of the scholars who 
seemed to have used folklore interchangeably with oral literature:

…folklore provides a vast tapestry which are woven in 
terrifying images and colours, many actions and incidents 
which can chill, terrify, depress and or excite the human 
imagination. Whether written or oral tales and lyrics are in 
a significant sense “creative refractions” of human 
condition into its varied colours to express vividly the 
realities of good and evil inherent in the soul of man (426).
Similarly, M.H. Abrams and Geoffrey Harpham (2012) 

whose work A Glossary of Literary Terms has been instrumental in 
the definition of some critical terms especially for students of 

literary studies also used folklore interchangeably with oral 
literature. In the entry for folklore, they defined it as “…sayings, 
verbal compositions, and social rituals that have been handed 
down solely, or at least primarily, by word of mouth and example 
rather than in written form…Folklore includes legends, 
superstitions, songs, tales, proverbs, riddles, spells, and nursery 
rhymes” (135-136).

In the above excerpts, it is glaring that folklore has been used to 
mean oral literature. To think of oral literature as folklore is a 
myopic way of looking at the entire lore of a folk. Oral literature is 
an aspect of folklore and not folklore itself. 

According to the website of The World Oral Literature 
Project, established by the University of Cambridge in 
collaboration with Yale University, a Canadian Encyclopedia 
suggests that "the term oral literature is sometimes used 
interchangeably with folklore, but it usually has a broader focus. 
The expression is self-contradictory: literature, strictly speaking, 
is that which is written down; but the term is used here to 
emphasize the imaginative creativity and conventional structures 
that mark oral discourse too”

Another term that scholars have used to designate oral 
literature is orature. The term was coined by PioZirimu, a 
Ugandan linguist. Zirimu seems to have coined this term to evade 
the use of the phrase oral literature because of its misconceived 
contradiction. According to André Kaboré (2007) PioZirimu 
proposed the term “orature” to palliate the alleged contradiction in 
the phrase “oral literature” or “spoken literature”. In another 
paper, Kaboréfurther argues thus: Many terms or phrases have 
been used to refer to literature that is not written. Femi Abodunrin 
in his critical appreciation of such a literature in Africa says that 
“oral  literature, orature, traditional literature, folk literature or 

Dele Maxwell Ugwuanyi & Richard Ifeanyichukwu Nnamani: Between Oral and Written 
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folklore” have been used to  describe this specific type of 
literature (29). The term oraturewhich is mentioned in this list was 
coined by the Ugandan linguist Pio Zirimu as a substitute for oral 
literature because, at the opposite of the German word 
“Wortkunst” (literally, art of words) which includes both oral and 
written forms, the term “literature” privileges writing, leading 
those who have a book-bound definition of literature to see a 
contradiction in the phrase “oral literature”; in their mind 
literature is nothing but written. (14)

To clarify these misconceptions, we do not intend to use a 
particular theory with rules and methods of analysis, rather, we 
shall use a sequence of logical objective interpretation to elucidate 
this age-long scholarly oversight.

Oral and Written Forms and the Dichotomy 
For IsidoreOkpewho (1992), “the word folklore implies 

much more than just literatureand some quarters underplay the 
literary aspects of what folk do” (4).Folklore is the entire body of 
culture of a group of people. It includes their customs, tradition, 
legends, history and art. Thus, we can say that folklore is a 
hypernym with the following hyponyms: customs, tradition, 
legend, epic, history, and art. Oral literature is not mentioned here 
as one of the hyponyms because it is subsumed in art, that is, it is 
one of the hyponyms of art. To put this more succinctly, art is a 
hypernym of the following hyponyms: music, painting, sculpting, 
literature and perhaps architecture. Literature (Poetry) according 
to Aristotle is the only form of art whose manner of representation 
is language alone. For the linguists also, language is a semiotic 
code with double signification- oral and written. So that we can 
now have oral and written forms of literature. Using the two terms 
interchangeably is synecdochical. Okpewho gives credence to this 
in his clarification of the term: 

Sometimes the use of the term folklore and oral literature 
is a little confusing. In many cases, the latter is used when 
the former is meant, i.e, a scholar may praise a Yoruba or 
Kibuyu proverb as an example of the quality of the 
people's folklore. This is something of a generalization. 
For if we examined the various aspects of the material 
culture of same people (their traditional architecture and 
weaving), there might be nothing so 'poetic' about them. 
Such generalizations, in which a part is used to represent a 
whole, are quite frequent in literature and perhaps 
excusable. Whatever errors may have been made in the 
early history of this subject, however, it is important to 
note that the folklore of a people consists of two kinds of 
activity: what these people intentionally say (e.g. songs, 
proverbs and tales) and what they traditionally do 
(weaving, dance, ritual) (5).

Similarly, orality is not the same as oral literature, even though 
oral literature is subsumed in orality. Orality, however, is a 
complex whole that includes things that are literary and things that 
are not but are verbally expressed. Paul Bandia (2018) has given 
credence to this by stating that “orality has shed its negative image 
as primitive, unwritten, non-literate and exotic and grown into a 
major field of scientific interest and the focus of interdisciplinary 
research” (125). This paper also agrees with Walter Ong (1982) in 
his categorization of orality according to the different contexts 
that produced them. He termed orality of cultures untouched by 
literacy as primary orality while orality that has come in contact 
with high technology, he termed secondary orality. In his words, 

I style the orality of a culture totally untouched by any 
knowledge of writing or print, primary orality. It is primary 
by contrast with the secondary orality of present-day high-
technology culture, in which a new orality is sustained by 
telephone, radio, television and other electronic devices 

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Another important question on the ongoing scholarly 
debate is what constitutes oral literature. If we define it exclusively 
as literature of the illiterate folks, we risk relegating this form of 
literature to the preliterate past. It could be argued that in those 
cultures where we hitherto found illiterate folk, we can now find 
greater percentage of the population of those folk to be literate. 
Then do we now say that since this literature, which should be oral, 
is coming from literate folks they should not be termed oral 
literature because of its old kinship with illiteracy? Or should the 
language define which is oral literature and which is not? Will a 
text become oral literature because it is written in, say, Igbo, 
Yoruba or Hausa?or any language that is not European?

Oral literature scholars should, as a matter of necessity, be 
able to clearly distinguish oral literature from other fields of study 
like anthropology, music, archaeology and history. Even though 
these are forms of art, they are not literature. Aristotle has clearly 
distinguished between history and oral literature in his Poetics; 
this distinction should not only be viewed vis a viz written 
literature only if we agree that literature is literature whether oral 
or written. He noted thus:

It is, moreover, evident from what has been said, that it is 
not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, 
but what may happen —what is possible according to the 
law of probability or necessity. The poet and the historian 
differ not by writing in verse or in prose. The work of 
Herodotus might be put into verse, and it would still be a 
species of history, with metre no less than without it. The 
true difference is that one relates what has happened, the 
other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more 
philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry 
tends to express the universal, history in particular. By the 
universal, I mean how a person of a certain type will on 
occasion speak or act, according to the law of probability 

that depend for their existence and functioning on writing 
and print (11).

However, for Panagiotis Roilos (2011), 'Orality' should be 
understood as a more flexible notion than 'oral traditional 
literature', since it may refer to all or any combination of the 
following processes of the creation and communication of verbal 
art: composition, performance, or transmission (233). Orality 
involves all patterned verbal expressions whether literary or non-
literary. Like our earlier analogy of folklore, orality has so many 
hyponyms of which oral literature is one. 

Having clarified these misconceptions, let us now attempt 
a re-evaluation of the term, Oral Literature and also take a review 
of the ongoing scholarly debates on the term. For many scholars, 
oral literature is an oxymoron that literally contradicts its 
meaning. It is the fear of falling prey to this seeming contradiction 
that have pushed many critics to prefer the use of such terms as 
folklore, orature, orality, oral tradition and oral heritage. Amidst 
these debates, IsidoreOkpewho, perhaps influenced by, Ruth 
Finnegan, has posited that this literature (oral literature) is the kind 
that is transmitted by word of mouth (1); so that the adjective 
oralbefore the literature is merely telling us the kind of literature it 
is. To further clarify this contradiction, it is important to reiterate 
Aristotle's position on the term, literature; even though he never 
mentioned the term, literature, outright; he avers that literature 
(poetry) is the form of art whose manner of representation is 
language alone-it is the study of things that can matter only to 
creatures that possess language. As we have earlier stated, 
language is a semiotic code with double signification-oral and 
written. This presupposes that we can have oral and written forms 
of literature. Oral literature is simply literature minus writing.

Dele Maxwell Ugwuanyi & Richard Ifeanyichukwu Nnamani: Between Oral and Written 
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Okpewho has earlier pointed out that those who started the 
study of oral literature were not literary scholars so their interest 
was not centred on the literariness of the oral art forms. For 
instance, the chants, sung poems, masquerade performances, 
folktales and proverbs or other veiled forms of language meant no 
more to them than a sociological tool through which the folk were 
entertained. The biased focus of their research informed the many 
non-literary elements introduced into oral literature. One of such 
elements is oral history which has been unbundled into legend, 
myth and ethnology. Even though those insights helped the 
informed knowledge in the discipline, the researchers have come 
to realise, after a thorough critical study, that the cores of oral 
literature have been strangely twisted. This is mainly because we 
have allowed those who are not literary scholars to theorize on oral 
literature and designate the primary objects of the discipline hence 
the infiltration of so many non-literary elements in the field. Even 
though some of these elements can be transmuted into oral 
literature, basic oral literary terms should be clarified to set 
boundaries between the discipline and other disciplines that have 
affiliations with folklore. 

It should be stated in strong terms that folklore, oral 
heritage, oral tradition and orality are not the same as oral 
literature and should not be used interchangeably. However, oral 
literature is subsumed in each of these terms. In view of this,  Okpe 
who noted that the major breakthrough in the field of oral literature 
started when African scholars began to undertake research into the 
oral tradition of their own people (4).Even though literature has 
resisted a watertight definition from the classical times, it is 
important to have a universal categorization of genres. It evident 
that oral literature has no defined genres perhaps because the 
supposed genres are strangely twisted with their elements so that 
those terms that are supposed to be devices/elements in the 
discipline are elevated to the status of genres. For instance, in 

or necessity; and it is this universality at which poetry aims 
in the names she attaches to the personages (11).

The above position by Aristotle has been widely held by literary 
scholars. Howeverit is viewed, there is no defence for not 
according African oral literature the many similar qualities it 
shares with its written counterpart. Almost every discipline in the 
humanities lays claim to oral literature because the early scholars 
failed to unbundle it from Folklore. The object of what is known to 
be oral literature should be clearly distinguished so that scholars 
and students would understand that the enterprise oftheir field is 
not questionable. Besides Okpewho, G.G. Darah,another scholar 
who realized that the field of oral literature is threatened by 
disciplines in the humanities and social sciences noted that 
folklore studies during its developing period followed trends set 
by evolutionist and anthropologists; for him, these scholars 
concentrated on the usefulness of the product and not on their 
artistic qualities (4). 

As far as evidence has allowed us to see, we have had more 
archaeologists and anthropologists theorize and philosophize on 
oral literature than literary scholars themselves. This has greatly 
affected the comparative categorization of oral literature and its 
written counterpart. For instance, an anthropologist has this to say 
about oral narrative:

(1) It allows humans beings to escape in fantasy from 
repressions imposed upon them by society. (2) It validates 
a culture, justifying rituals and institutions to those who 
perform and observe them. (3) It educates those in need of 
education, children in particular. (4) It maintains social 
control by encouraging conformity to accepted patterns of 
behaviour. (Poetry as Social Praxis, 68).

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the etymology of the word literature means 'writing' so that the 
word'oral literature' is a kind oxymoronic violence that should not 
be tolerated in scholarship should also understand that there is a 
hypocritical contradiction staring them in the face in the 
etymology of many words of English language. The word 
language, just like literature, is from Latin origin (langue) which 
literally means 'tongue'. Language does not mainly function a 
means of communication, its primary function is for the 
production of thoughts and not merely communication. If 
language which draws its etymology from 'tongue' is now flexibly 
receptive to accommodate some other forms like the written form 
and sign language, then how is oral literature a contradiction? If 
'Written' can stand as a participle before language and 'sign' can 
stand as an adjective before language, then are we not recklessly 
negligent and guilty of the same nomenclatural oxymoron about 
which we accuse scholars who argue that oral literature is the 
literature that is transmitted by word of mouth? As Panagiotis 
Roilos posited, the corpus of verbal art defined as 'oral literature' is 
distinguished from written literary forms on the basis of its 
'orality' (225).

To further buttress this position, if we take a brief look at 
the history of some words, what is called, in linguistics, 
etymology; we would find out that some words do not have any 
kinship with their etymology. They, are therefore, arbitrary with 
their etymologies. If we take a look at the origin of the word, 
language, we find out that it is of Latin origin, Langue/Lingua, 
which means tongue. Similarly, the origin of the word salary is 
quite arbitrary to its usage nowadays. Salary actually drew its 
origin from the word salt.For instance, the word mouse does not 
have any relationship with its etymology. The meaning was 
attached to the word because of technological advancement. Some 
have argued that computer scientist came about the name because 
of the device's resemblance with the rodent, mouse. If the meaning 

African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 
Olaniyan and Quayson(2007)  enumerate the following as genres 
of oral literature: storytelling, proverbs, epics, incantations, 
panegyrics,  occasion-specific poetries and dramatic 
performances. As noted by Panagiotis Roilos, oral literature 
constitutes a conspicuous nomenclatural oxymoron (Oral 
Literature, 225). Proverbs, riddles, tongue twisters, adages, retorts 
and other epigrammatic configurations should not be categorized 
as genres of oral literature since these things are also found in 
literature but are not classed as genres of literature. They are, no 
doubt, figurative but they cannot be grouped under the three major 
genres of literature. Panagiotis Roilos further poses this as a 
research question here: 

Should the concept of 'oral literature' include all types of 
verbal discourse (e. g. tales, spells, proverbs, riddles) that 
deviate from the communicative norm of everyday speech 
in terms of form (aesthetics) and 'function' (performance)? 
If, as is indicated by scholarly practice in a number of 
fields, a positive answer to the last question seems to enjoy 
a significant consensus among researchers, approaches to 
the two other issues are more controversial and certainly 
more demanding, since they presuppose systematic 
investigations into specific synchronic textures of 
sociocultural interaction (229).

It should be noted primarily that language is the only manner of 
representation of the art form called literature; and in language, 
there is the oral and written modes of transmission. This 
presupposes that there are oral and written forms of literature. If 
literature is universal, there should also be the universal 
categorization of the genres of literature-the oral and written 
forms. 

Scholars who argue that oral literature is a contradiction because 

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Change during the Digital Revolution”, thus: 
Researchers often refer to two different types of factors 
that cause semantic change: Linguistic and Extra-
Linguistic. Daiu (2015) discusses some of the linguistic 
factors, for instance, the influence of other languages, 
where borrowed words can cause older expressions to fall 
out of use. Furthermore, the existence of homonyms can 
cause semantic change. If two words appear the same but 
denote entirely different things, one of the meanings might 
be used less in order to avoid misunderstandings (Daiu, 
2015). Extra-linguistic factors range from human 
psychology to the environments we live in. One example 
of how human psychology works as an extra linguistic 
factor is discussed by Crowley (1992). Another extra-
linguistic factor is technological advances. For example, 
Riemer (2010, p. 373) mentions the verb fly. Today fly can 
denote being a passenger on an aeroplane, which would 
have been impossible before the invention of the 
aeroplane. Given that the speed of technological 
advancements has been much greater during the past few 
hundred years than ever before it should entail that many 
new meanings have been added to the English language. 
Harris (2014) maintains that technological advancements 
create new environments for people. New environments, 
in turn, cause semantic change(1).

Conclusion 
We can see that trends in technology, for want of creating 

new words, have invested meanings on existing words which do 
not have any etymological kinship with these associated 
meanings. However, metaphorical relationships are forced on 
them so that they embody these meanings without any need for 
holding any word conference by linguists. If these words can 
embody these meanings without much scholarly arguments, why 

came about as a result of this resemblance, how do you explain the 
wireless mouse? The arbitrariness of language has allowed 
meaning association to many words. For instance, the words 
mouse, web, window, page, cloud, application, key and many 
other words have undergone a grave semantic shift since the 

th
middle of 20  century till now due to advancement in technology. 
To accept that all these words mentioned here do not have any 
clear etymological relationship with the recent semantics they 
embody will be very startling to scholars who still perceive oral 
literature as a contradiction. 

In view of this, how do we explain that these words do not 
have any kinship with their origin? What accounts for 
thisaccording to linguists is semantic change. For Traugott:

Since language is a communicative activity, semantic 
change is inevitable (1). Linguistic approaches to 
semantic change have addressed the outcome of meaning 
change and analysed the types of change, such as meaning 
broadening and narrowing, metaphoric and metonymic 
extension, and the developments of positive and negative 
meaning or what is referred to as amelioration and 
pejoration…Words change their meanings overtime and 
acquire new semantics.  (Hock & Joseph 2009; Paradis 
2011; Traugott 2012qtd in “The Semantic Change of Positive 

Vs. Negative Adjectives in Modern English”, 1).

Since words are arbitrary, any word is capable of encoding an 
infinite number of meanings without the meaning necessarily 
having any relationship with their etymology.  However, semantic 
change does not just occur, there are reasons that account for the 
shift even though linguists have not come into unanimous 
conclusions on the motivations for these changes. Johan 
Andersson has summarized some of the reasons that account for 
such changes in his paper, “Bug Report: A Study of Semantic 

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Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the 
Word. Methuen, 1982.

Paul Bandia. “Orality and Translation”.1st ed. Taylor and Francis, 
2018.

Roilos, Panagiotis. "Oral Literature, Ritual, and the Dialectics of 
Performance".Medieval Oral Literature, edited by Karl 
Reichl, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2011.  

would literary scholars have issues with the word literature 
capturing its written and oral forms? 

Works Cited
Abdel Rahman MitibAltakhaineh. The Semantic Change of 

Positive Vs. Negative Adjectives   in Modern English. The 
Poznań Society for the Advancement of Arts and  
Sciences, 2018, pp. 25-38.

Abrams, M.H. and Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. A Glossary of 
Literary Terms. Wadsworth,  Cengage Learning. 2012.

Akporobaro, F.B.O. Introduction to African Oral Literature. 
Princeton Publishing Co. 2012

Andersson, Johan. “Bug Report: A Study of Semantic Change 
during the Digital Revolution”. T h e s i s . S t o c k h o l m 
University, Faculty of Humanities, Department of 
English.2020.

Aristotle. Aristotle's Poetics.New York:Hill and Wang, 1961.
Darah, Godini G. “Creativity and Performance in Oral Poetry” 

The Palgrave Handbook of African Oral Traditions and 
Folklore, edited by AkintundeAkinyemi  andToyin 
Falola. Springer Nature Switzerland AG.2021

Kabore, Andre. “Orature as the Characteristic of the Literature of 
Werewere-Liking and Pacere”.International Journal of 
Studies in English Language and Literature, vol. 2, no 4, 
2014, pp. 13-30.

- - -  .  “ P a c e r e  a s  t h e  D e m i u r g e  o f  O r a t u r e ” 
TydskrifvirLetterkunde.Issue 1, 2007.

Niles, John. Poetry as Social Praxis". Homo Narrans: The Poetics 
and Anthropology of Oral Literature. University of 
Pennsylvania Press, 2010.

Okpewho, Isidore. African Oral Literature: Backgrounds, 
Character, and Continuity.Indiana University Press, 1992.

Olaniyan, Tejumola, and AtoQuayson. African Literature: An 
Anthology of Criticism and Theory. Blackwell Pub, 2007.

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                                                                  Literary Forms: (Re) Understanding the Dichotomy

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