102 The Musicalization of Language as a Mode of Social Memory Construction and as a Strategy of Self-Preservation of the Oppressed: as Exemplified by the Language and Music of the Alevi Abdurrahman Gülbeyaz Osaka University 1. Introduction My paper intends to be a succinct discourse upon the nature and function of the transformation of language into music in the context of, and in connection with, memory and memory related phenomena. Since this appears to me to always be the case with human speech, no matter what the actual subject is, this monologue will also, at least implicitly, be entirely concerned with the differential features of sublunary humanoids. That is why I thought it would not be out of place to prepare the grounds for my arguments and assumptions relating to the points specified in the title by touching on that same old elemental terrain of human existence, which I am going to do in the first stage of my presentation. Based upon, and parallel to, the assumptions made in the course of this initial move I’m going give a rough sketch of human modes of communication, drawing attention to those aspects which I hold to be the most constitutive and differentiating. In the second stage I am going to talk about memory, trying to delineate what memory in relation to language is, and what it is not. The contemplation in this connection will inevitably, but for the most part tacitly, have recourse to the ongoing philosophical debate on linguistic and non-linguistic communication, to the theories of oral tradition, to psychoanalysis, to the theory of formulaic speech, to memetics, etc. In the final stage, I am going to introduce the transformation of linguistic utterance into a musical one, as a mode of detention, recall and transfer of mental entities in human society, and will eventually try to elucidate and exemplify the social functions of this process which, against the background of the thematic settings here and today, appear to me to be the most focal ones.