Abstract
Children's folklore has been around in every culture since time immemorial up to the present day. Children all over the world have been playing with their peers using more or less established language expressions, and children's oral folklore is one of the most varied and lively phenomena of folk culture. Children are always keen to create their own language expressions, and they do so independently of any institution (be it school or family).
Children's folklore refers to the spontaneous expressions of children that take place most often within their appropriate age group. It includes a wealth of rhymes, fairy tales, games or even established rituals maintained and organized by a child or children within their peer group. Children's folklore also includes short taunts, often in the form of a question (or an allusion) and an answer, as well as jokes or incidents that happened to the child and the child finds them funny or interesting enough to be worthy of conveying to his/her friends - a sort of rudimentary folk storytelling. Children's play helps children understand the ways the world works, find their own roles in it and prepare for their roles in the future. Games recorded around the middle of the 20th century show how children were preparing for their future gender roles in society by playing with objects with a specific role for this purpose - for girls, these were dolls helping train them for future motherhood, boys fought with sticks or clubs in imitation of real soldiers. Play helps bring children up and educate them. It is a lesson in perseverance and concentration, but also physical activity, fast reflexes and quick response. It also requires some effort in performing certain tasks and in thinking about each phase, and in combining a certain text (or song) with a movement that is either predetermined, or invented on the spot. Children at play become each other's teachers - younger children learn from the older ones, less experienced players learn from those with more experience. More skilled players explain the rules of the game to newcomers, having to use appropriate vocabulary and have a sufficient knowledge of the game for the new players to get a grasp of it as soon as possible. Playing games is a challenge for children; however, children themselves censor their games to make sure they remain within the scope of their physical and verbal abilities. Moreover, no game is mandatory and every child can choose whether he/she wants to participate in it. The subject of this monograph is children's verbal folklore, specifically the genres of taunting, counting-out games and games with verbal accompaniment, as well as short songs and rhymes that fall within the range of the abovementioned genres. The mapping of children's folklore is based primarily on the analysis of the collections of children's folklore that have already been published. After a theoretical introduction, the text is divided in two parts, one of which deals with traditional and the other with contemporary children's folklore. In the former, the focus is placed on the collections of children's folklore published from the 19th century to the 1980s and the verbal expressions used in them, the latter includes texts from the 1980s to the present day; besides book collections of children's folklore, it introduces a very interesting new environment in which children's verbal folklore can be collected; it is the Internet, namely YouTube, where children themselves post videos of their games, in which the "hand-clapping" genre prevails.
If we are to compare traditional and contemporary children's verbal folklore, we arrive at the following conclusions: 1) in both cases, children's folklore is still alive and it is passed on among children themselves without intervention by adults or institutions; 2) children's folklore is very flexible in responding to the current developments in society: while the main theme of the games of the first half of the 20th century were domestic animals, farms, or soldiers, from the 1980s onwards, they are progressively populated with TV heroes (Sandokan, later Winnetou or Harry Potter); since the 1980s, there has been an increasing amount of hand-clapping games, songs with new lyrics set to traditional folk song tunes (e.g. a very famous song Prší Prší) and even a new structure - the class anthem - appeared (where personalized lyrics are set to the theme song of the popular children's story "Mach and Šebestová").