How might growing up with the language of tap dance change how one thinks about the world?

Growing up with oral traditions like that can have several effects on how an individual perceives and exists in the world. Tap dancing, originating from the unorthodox circumstances of slavery and its oppressive nature hones a rich history.  A developed skill like tap dancing is all about rhythm and timing coexisting with one another so you must be in tune with oneself to tell a story. Growing up with oral traditions/languages like this it outlines what communication can look and sound like, that it does not have to be what society typically believes it to be. Instead of resorting to complex sentence structures and expressing yourself through telling, tap dancing has to do with one’s body awareness and creativity, you speak through the rhythm and taps, almost like morse code. Straying away from presenting ideas through talking it became clear to those who grew up with languages like tap dance that you can use other means to express self. People like the speaker get a new awareness of reality where for instance Alex mentions how he is always listening to the taps he hears out in his environment, and at the end when he does a tap dance before departing it was his way of wrapping things up with his own language.

What sonic, spoken, or even silent “languages” do you possess, and how do they change the ways you think?

In my world whenever I am in a situation of high energy or high emotion, I use noises. This may sound weird but for example whenever there is an awkward situation amongst my friends Ill blurt out some random noise, (like blurting out a tune and maybe even dancing along with it) as immature as it may seem, everyone understands I’m simply trying to break the ice or bring the energies down. I only do these in my inner circle. Some other things that relate to noises that I understand, but don’t personally use, is how my grandmother would use objects of small size, usually jangly, to hit them on a surface or jangle them around to share what she’s thinking. For instance, she would jangle her keys fast when she feels threatened or needs something to speed up. She would tap her cutlery or a stick like structure on a surface at a steady beat slowly indicating to me that she’s thinking about something or thinking of her response when talking to me. Now I know its not something I personally use, however it is an oral tradition that I understand, or ‘speak’. I also speak Turkish, English, little bit of Circassian, and I understand and can speak basic level Spanish. All these shape how I interact with people, what cultures I can learn and experience, how I analyze life and the world, and it all enables me to process various forms of communication.