Many would say that language makes us human, and few would deny that language lies very close to the heart of human experience. But what is language? Is it Noam Chomsky’s impeccable system of logical concatenations, housed in the human brain, accessible only to the idealized speaker–listener? Or is it a well-worn but always energized instrument, deployed strategically as people go about their business in the world? This is the question that provoked the rise of sociolinguistics and the ethnography of speaking, and that led in folkloristics to the formulation of the performance-centered paradigm, directly challenging the Chomskyan sequestration of language study to the formal rigor of generative grammar.

Folklorists’ work is strongly ethnographic and is immersed in the messiness of speech practice. While we can appreciate the elegance of syntactic structures with their rules and formulas, we never lose sight of the creativity, and passion that speakers bring to the process of making this system come alive. Indeed, it is to this life-giving process that we are relentlessly drawn. Granted, natural or ordinary language, fashioned over time in human communities, evinces a remarkable structure of logic; folklorists and others who attend to the spoken word know that this is only part of the story.

While Chomsky-inspired theoretical linguistics focus on their generative grammars; sociolinguistics arises to ascertain how language actually operates in the lived realities of society, with close attention paid to language variation, to the influence of social setting on speech production, and to the interplay of languages, dialects, and idiolects in complex modern societies. The ethnography of speaking evolves in tandem with this project as scholars attempt to document the world’s speech practices. These developments mark an intellectual revolution that relocates the study of language in the social arenas where people deploy, refine, and reshape the linguistic resources at their disposal.

Enter the folklorist with expertise in the study of situated artistic communication, and the scene is set for cultivating an oral poetics that attends to the production and reception of stylized discourse in performance arenas where aesthetic elaboration has instrumental value. The folklorist’s longstanding engagement with genre, tradition, art, and performance, and his deep connections to the communities he studies enables him to make unique and needed contributions to understanding language as a social resource. The result is an ethnography of speaking folklore that has enriched the wider discussion and fostered inspired work by a good many folklorists.

This intellectual paradigm, with its articulation of performance as the key moment in the production and circulation of culture, will continue to inspire rewarding scholarly effort in the coming years. The spoken word, and its written derivatives in such online venues as Twitter posts and YouTube vlogs, remains at the center of social life in the world’s societies. Verbal forms of expressive culture continue to figure in the political and spiritual life of the world’s peoples, and forms of talk connect and separate people just as they have in the past.

Given the prominence of speech across the whole range of human experience, we stand to benefit from a research paradigm that allows us to inspect and analyze the life and vibrancy of verbal performances that factors so centrally into their achieving and challenging social connectivity. Stale, sterile, synthetic paradigms of the past must be done away with. Within this concerted flow of spoken language, the expressive forms that have occupied the attention of folklorists for centuries have their own special place, and a folkloristics that is attuned to performative efficacy will continue to offer valuable insights into the conduct of human affairs.

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