Alliteration and scansion in Somali oral poetry and their cultural correlates

In the oral poetry of various societies there are wide variations in the systems of versification: some impose demanding formal constraints on the language which poets use, while others are very lax in this respect. The question arises as to whether such variations can be correlated in any way with other cultural phenomena present in the particular society, and although the answer could only be arrived at by a thorough examination of a large number of societies and would require the cooperation of several researchers.