ENG3U

Local Slang

Local Slang: to me this means a certain accent or set of words that a group of people use. It brings a sense of community and identity within the group or culture.

Culture/ Group:

Anishnaabe people or, Ojibway peoples.

The accent that my culture has is that everyone talks slurred and everyone talks really loud. It’s considered to be a “nish accent”. A lot of Anishnaabe people speak with this accent, there are many dialects and many other groups and cultures that have different accennts like, Cree people.

What I mean by slurred is that we make a lot of shortcuts when speaking, slurring words. A very popular one that you hear all over is “skoden”, sounds silly but everyone who speaks with a nish accent will say this when they are meaning to be saying “let’s go then” to someone else. Exaggerated and loud means that everyone speaks very loud. It’s like everyones yelling at each other, but not meaning too. Why? I don’t know, that’s just how we talk.

Side note: One time, the word “skoden” was spray painted on a water tower in a city and people started taking it as a threat in a way. Not knowing what the word really meant, you can see an article on it here.

GraphicMama-team / Pixabay

Another thing that I noticed is that we say the word “ever” in front of everything. For example; ever deadly, ever sick, ever gross, ever sad, and the list could go on and on.

Living in my community all my life, I also talk like this. Especially adding the “ever” in front of everything.

 

 

 

 

ENG3U

Why wouldn’t I want to live in Gaawaandagkoong First Nation?

In Moon of the Crusted Snow the story took place in a place called Gaawaandagkoong First Nation. This community is located way up north. So when things went sour (cell service/internet went out, power went out, and there was no food delivery) they had nobody to contact to see what was going wrong.

would not liked to have lived in this community during this time period because these people could not go anywhere because it was winter, and the snow was coming down hard leaving there be no way in or out of the community. I would feel like I was trapped. Trapped in the sense that I would have nowhere to go, the only option that was there for me was to sit there and wait, wait for the time to come where the community would run out of the stashed food.

Printeboek / Pixabay