ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the phenomenon of orality in Southeast Asia. It contains a bird’s-eye view of oral traditions in mainland and insular Southeast Asia and then focuses on storytelling and singing in two adjacent regions in insular Southeast Asia: Southwest Maluku (Indonesia) and Lautém (Timor-Leste). The section on storytelling shows that both regions share the same narration settings, storytelling techniques and performance pragmatics. The section on singing shows that the traditions Lautém and Southwest Maluku are partly divergent. Whereas vaihoho in Lautém are single language texts that are sung in polyphony, tyarka texts in Southwest Maluku are composed of vocabulary from different languages and are sung in monophony.
