ABSTRACT
The study of children’s rhymes and folklore has been a cross-disciplinary venture, involving folklorists, literary scholars, historians, linguists, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists and ethnomusicologists as well as non-academics such as play consultants and teachers. Children’s play may be solitary whereas children’s folklore is usually construed as a social phenomenon involving interaction between several children. Research on childlore has also been marked by a number of changes linked to broader academic and societal issues, including the evolution of technology and paradigm shifts within folklore studies and other disciplines. Researchers have long recognised that children’s rhymes and folklore, like folk songs and folk tales, spread from culture to culture, hopping over geographical and linguistic barriers. According to C. Brailoiu, children’s rhythms, as embodied in children’s rhymes, constitute an immediately recognisable autonomous system that is ‘spread over a considerable surface of the earth, from Hudson Bay to Japan’.
