Suulisus, kirjalikkus ja digitaalsus kultuuris ja teaduses

• Authors: Jaago Tiiu

Title variants

EN

ORALITY, LITERACY, AND DIGITALITY IN CULTURE AND RESEARCH

• Languages of publication: ET

Abstracts

EN

The introductory overview provides a more general framework for understanding the articles published in this special issue. The discussions presented from the folkloristic point of view dwell upon the writing practices followed by Jakob Hurt’s correspondents in the late 19th century. The authors highlight the multilevelness of the writing experience and style manifest in the contributions of Hurt’s correspondents, which draw partly either on oral speech, reading, dialects, or unified spelling system. Also, in this period folklore was regarded as a phenomenon of oral culture, and therefore folklore collectors eliminated the idea of these stories being related to written culture. However, this approach did not correspond to reality. According to the 1881 census data, 34% of Estonians could both read and write, and 60.9% could only read. For an easier understanding of this situation in a historical perspective, this introductory overview presents, drawing on history research, the development features of Estonian peasants’ writing culture in the Reformation and Enlightenment eras (16th–18th cc.) and data about literacy in 19th-century Estonia. It is shown how Estonian-language writing turned from a means of communication (local Germans needed Estonian-language texts to communicate with the peasantry) into a language of education. It is also possible to follow how different information and diverse spheres of culture are related to either oral or written texts (e.g., religious and legal literature, which differed from oral lore based on experience). Further studies into orality and literacy discuss their dissimilarities on both linguistic and communicative levels. Late 20th-century research, however, moved to studying the connections between orality and literacy in comparison to digital presentations. On the one hand, scholars discuss the issues of environmental influence on text creation, on the other hand, the novel ways and boundaries of communication spaces.

Keywords

EN

orality; literacy; digitality

• Publisher: Folk Belief and Media Group of the Estonian Literary Museum, Estonian Institute of Folklore, EKM Teaduskirjastus
• Journal: Mäetagused
• Year: 2018
• Volume: 70
• Pages: 5-12

Contributors

author

Jaago Tiiu

• Department of Estonian and Comparative Folklore, Institute of Cultural Research, University of Tartu, Ülikooli 18, 50090 Tartu, ESTONIA