The Yugoslav oral tradition was the product of a combination of some factors. The masses naturally brought traditions with them from their ancient Slavic homeland to the lands where they settled on the boundary of the civilizations of East and West. This was combined with the tradition they had encountered in the new land, which was the direct contact with the classical heritage. Later on, it developed further as it defended itself from oriental influences, while accepting elements of those influences at the same time. From the 15th century, there are mentions and recordings in a book of orally transmitted process and poetry. They functioned within the bounds of the poetics of written literature, at times surfacing as independent entities and giving testimony to the high level of development in the system of orally transmitted literature. This paper aims to give a conspectus of Yugoslav oral literature. As an introduction, notions of two terms for Yugoslav oral literature, ‘narodna književnost’ and ‘usmena književnost’ were presented. And the 2nd chapter deals with the classified systems of oral literature by genres in Yugoslavia. In the 3rd and 4th chapters are treated with the historical and social backgrounds for the development of oral literature and the transition from the oral literary works to the documentary literature. The 5th chapter is the outline of researches for Yugoslav oral literature which were carried out in the inside and outside of a country. From the manuscript collections of the second half of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century, Serbian historian Baltazar Bogišić published a volume entitled 󰡔Songs from the older, mostly coastal manuscripts󰡕. The first large collection of folk songs in decasyllabic verse was copied down at the beginning of the 18th century by an unknown Austrian officer somewhere along the Military Border which was under Austrian control at that time. It was published in 1925 under the title The Erlangen Manuscript by the German Slavist, Gerhard Gesemann. At the beginning and in the middle of the 19th century, the first systematic collections of Serbian folk songs, folktales, riddles and proverbs were published. They had been collected by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić from the lips of the masses. - A Small Simple-Folk Slavonic-Serbian Song(1814), Serbian Folk Song(Vols. I-IV, Leipzig edition, 1823-1833; Vols. I-IV, Vienna edition, 1841-1862), Serbian Folk Tales (First edition, 1821 and second 1853), Serbian Folk Proverbs and Other Common Expressions(1834). Yugoslav folk poetry created a great sensation, as it appeared in Europe when romanticism was in full bloom. Their folk poetry, which appeared in Karadžić\'s anthological collections, met the expectations of the educated European audience, offering a living confirmation of Herder\'s and Grimm\'s ideas about the oral tradition. And Jacob Grimm began to learn Serbian so that he could read the poems in the original. Thanks to Jacob Grimm, moreover to the initiatives of the well-educated Slovene Jernej Kopitar who was been Karadžić\'s counselor and protector for Yugoslav oral traditions and Serbian standard language, Yugoslav folk literature found its place in the literature of the world and acquired his own reputation. Yugoslav folk songs (and folk-tales) were translated into German practically as quickly as they were published in Yugoslavia and Germany, sometimes beforehand, coming directly from Karadžić\'s manuscripts or dictations. Kopitar translated the entire first volume of the Yugoslav Folk Song for Grimm, followed by a series of other poems in his review of the Leipzig edition. Grimm himself began to translate them as well. On the basis of his translations, others were done in many foreign languages. There were translations into English by John Bowring, into French by Elisa Voilar, into Swedish by Johan Runeberg and into Russian by Pushkin. And the poems were translated into all Slavic languages.