The Word That Will Not Sit Still: Orality, Collective Authorship, and the Living Grammar of Folk Expression

Abstract

This paper examines folk language and folk literature not as archival remnants of a vanished peasant past but as a continuously regenerating system of communication bound to performance, reception, and community. Drawing on Alan Dundes's taxonomy of folk speech, Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of carnivalesque humor, and the oral-formulaic scholarship of Albert Lord and Walter Ong, the paper argues that the folk text resists the fixity of print and mechanical recording because each performance is authored anew through the interaction of speaker and listener. The essay further considers the question of authorship and collective ownership in folk literature, contrasting it with the individualist logic of modern intellectual property, before turning to a case study of the Bhakti saint-poets of Maharashtra, namely Chokhamela, Namdev, and Tukaram, whose deliberate rejection of Sanskrit and adoption of vernacular verse forms such as the abhang, the bharud, and the gavalan illustrate how folk language becomes an instrument of social access and, at moments, social protest. The paper concludes that folklore's apparent instability, its refusal to be finished, is in fact the principal source of its cultural power.