As human beings interact on a daily basis, they express themselves through a finite number of readily familiar and easily distinguishable communicative processes and forms. Singing, musicmaking, dancing, playing and storytelling, for example, are processes by means of which men and women characterize their perceptions, reveal their aspirations and fears, transmit to others their conceptions and interpretations of memorable events, teach and reinforce social norms and values, and occupy the leisure hours of the day. The deeds of historical and idealized heroes are portrayed in story and song; life-cycle events are celebrated through ritual and dance; and natural and supernatural phenomena are depicted visually on material objects and symbolically through the roles and movements of people at play. Human beings' abilities to express their thoughts and feelings through readily familiar and easily distinguishable communicative processes and forms differentiate their species from all others and justify their claim to uniqueness.
Because they have been in existence continuously through recorded time and universally through space, communicative processes such as storytelling, singing, playing, dancing, and musicmaking can be viewed as traditions deserving of documentation and study because of the fundamental roles they play in the lives of all human beings. Similarly, specific songs, stories, tunes, dances, rituals, proverbs, riddles, games, and objects, once created, often become models which others imitate or emulate. A well-constructed narrative plot, for example, may not only be remembered, but it may also serve as a foundation for multiple storytellings, in each of which the same basic character types and series of integrated actions are discernible. A proverb, once created, may be spoken on a variety of social occasions because of its aptness to the behaviour of the participants or to an event which is the topic of their discourse. A set of realistic figures or geometric designs, once painted on pottery or woven into cloth by one person, may be reproduced or transformed by others because of its beauty or its relevance to their relative status, position or worldview. Like communicative processes, expressive forms and specific examples or aspects of them which seem, because of the similarities they exhibit, to be frequently imitated or emulated, repeated or reproduced, modified or transformed can also be viewed as traditional phenomena or simply as traditions; and they are worthy of documentation and study because they constitute evidence of continuities or consistencies in human thought or behaviour through time or space respectively. It is those communicative processes, forms, and examples or aspects of them which human beings view as traditional or simply as traditions that can be identified either collectively or individually as folklore; and it is those communicative processes, forms, and examples or aspects of them which appear to be traditional for the whole human species, for members of specific societies or social sub-groups, or for particular individuals that serve as the phenomena upon which folklorists focus in their investigations and that constitute the data-base for their field of inquiry, a field that can be identified as either folklore studies or folkloristics.