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.

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.