Poccasin English

Poccasin English
Cassinglish
Created by	Jukethatbox
Date	2025
Setting	Adventures in the Poccasins
Native to	Poccasin Archipelago
Ethnicity	Poccasins
Language family	Indo-European Germanic West Germanic North Sea Germanic Anglo-Frisian Anglic English Poccasin English
Early forms	Proto-Indo-European Proto-Germanic Proto-West Germanic Proto-English Old English Middle English Early Modern English Modern English
Writing system	Latin

Poccasin English or Cassinglish is a variety of the English language native to the Poccasin Archipelago and Poccasin Federation. Today, it is primarily spoken by upper-class urbanites in Cassim Po, the capital of the Poccasin Federation, and is commonly considered the international trade language of the Federation alongside the English creole language Bemé.

Poccasin English is typically considered the most prestigious or mesolectal language in the Poccasins, as it is commonly associated with the upper classes in the Federation. As such, although stable, there are actually very few monolingual speakers of Poccasin English; most speakers of Poccasin English are usually bilingual with Bemé and incorporate a creole continuum in their speech that goes beyond the traditional tak and kriyal distinction in Bemé.

Poccasin English generally follows British spelling conventions, though more recent loanwords from American English may retain their American spelling, so "colour/color" is spelt as in British English, colour, but "person of color/person of colour" is spelt as in American English, person of color, because the term is chiefly used in the US. However, various degrees of eye dialect spellings are also common.

Poccasin English also features a rather unique phonology, such as a full trap-strut merger as well as the loss of a /v/ phoneme (merging into /b/), and unique vocabulary derived primarily from Bemé and other indigenous language of the Poccasin Archipelago.

Phonology

Consonants

	Bilabial	Labiodental	Alveolar	Post-alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Stop	p b		t d			k g	(ʔ)
Nasal	m		n		ɲ	(ŋ)
Affricate				tʃ dʒ
Fricative	f		s	ʃ			h
Approximant	w		l	r	j

Poccasin English has significantly less phonemic consonants than other standard varieties of English.

• Th-stopping: /θ ð/ are realized as alveolar stops /t d/.
  • This is a common feature of many other standard varieties of English, such as Nigerian, Indian and Caribbean English.
• Lack of aspiration: Although not phonemic in English, plosives are usually still aspirated at the beginning of words in most varieties of English. This is however altogether absent in Poccasin English apart from in very high-class dialects.
  • A Poccasin English speaker who strongly aspirates their initial plosives in order to deliberately sound high class or distinguish themselves from working class speakers is called a puffer, pronounced /ˈpafər/.

Vowels

Monophthongs (short)

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i		u
Mid	ɛ	ə	ɔ
Open		a

Short /i/ is raised to a close front /i/, and not the more typical near-front near-close /ɪ/ found in other dialects of English such as General American or Received Pronunciation.

Another distinctive feature of Poccasin English is the trap-strut merger, where the typically distinct trap vowel /æ/, as seen in words like cat, rat and that, and the strut vowel /ʌ/, as seen in cut, mutt and rut, merge into the open central vowel /ä/, which is more often written simply as /a/. This means that words like cat and cut are homophones.

Monophthongs (long)

	Front	Central	Back
Close	(iː)		uː
Mid	ɛː		oː
Open	aː

The status of long /iː/ as a phoneme is debated; although traditionally considered distinct from short /i/ by linguists, modern scholars have found that a growing number of primarily younger, working-class speakers have begun incorporating a kit-fleece merger, so that fit and feet are pronounced the same. However, a lack of such a merger is still generally considered the standard pronunciation.