<p></p><p dir="ltr">The Tai literature of Vietnam: verse narrative from the Southeast Asian oral tradition</p>

In an earlier report from the project the poetic and prosaic compositions, typically of the former, performed during public gatherings of significant cultural importance, were described as important sources of linguistic and cultural continuity. The oral tradition performances range from private family gatherings to large public events.

Local language scholars preserve transcribed manuscripts and a number of field researchers, associated with this work of documentation, have uploaded a representative sample of the compositions on the internet. Historically, this corpus of Tai popular literature has developed over the many years in close contact with its counterpart in Vietnamese language. The thematic and formal parallels between the two lines of cultural inheritance have become evident from the work of field philologists and students of published Southeast Asian literature.