Oral Traditions and Preservations of Cultural Heritage
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Date
2023
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Abstract
It was pointed out by Ìṣọ̀lá (2010) that culture is God's own way of organizing people all over the world in cohesive groups, each around a language, with its own peculiar skills and knowledge…A group's language makes effective and independent operation possible. Moreover, Bọ́láńlé Awẹ́ in Adéẹ̀kọ́ (2001) opined that historians of non-literate societies should view oral traditions as valuable sources for chronicling the evolution of African social and cultural consciousness, because in societies without permanent archives, creative orature captures the mentalities of their milieu of production and consumption .This paper therefore discusses the relevance of oral traditions as a medium whereby multifarious African languages can be preserved and documented if tactically utilized. So far language is a culture dictionary, or rather its encyclopedia, its issues cannot be underestimated or viewed with a nonchalant attitude in society. To preserve and document African languages to prevent them from going into extinction, oral traditions play prominent roles. This paper explicates the roles of oral traditions to revive or save the endangered languages and for the preservation of cultural heritage. Africa is home to about 2,000 of the 6,000 languages spoken in the world today and many of these languages are used mostly in the oral or unwritten form. It plays the role of recalling the past through its complexity. As mentioned earlier, the aim of this paper is to explicate the authenticity of oral traditions towards the preservation, documentation and revival of African languages and cultural heritage.