Folklore—Central Asia

Folklore—Central Asia

Through oral folklore the peoples of Central Asia express their identity in speech and song while renewing and refashioning links with their past. The numerous Central Asian verbal art genres are as diverse as life's varied situations, yet share common features owing to regional cultural contacts and common origins. The forms of folklore expression are intimately tied to language. The Karakalpaks, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, Uighurs, and Uzbeks all speak Turkic languages and have a shared stock of oral traditions; the Tajiks speak an Iranian language and have distinct traditions, but their Persian cultural heritage has influenced the folklore of their Turkic neighbors, especially the Turkmen, Uighurs, and Uzbeks.

"Oral tradition" refers not only to a body of tales, epics, songs, proverbs, and legends, but also to the ways in which these verbal materials are created and transmitted. Texts are rarely handed down verbatim through the generations; each successive bearer of the tradition, as an active practitioner of oral folk art, recreates an expression by using patterns, styles, and performance situations as traditional as the words themselves. Central Asian peoples have contributed significantly to folklorists' understanding of the worldwide phenomenon of oral composition-in-performance and of oral tradition in general.

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