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. It 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 acrolectal language in the Poccasins, as it is commonly associated with the upper classes within the Federation. Thus, similarly to the status of Bemé, there are 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/, so day and they become homophones.
  • 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.
• V-stopping: /v/ is realized as /b/ in all positions, so bat and vat become homophones.
• Variability of /f/: /f/ is fairly unstable in even standard Poccasin English; the most common realizations vary from the bilabial /ɸ/ to true labiodental /f/, but it has also been recorded to range as far back as a glottal /h/ or may be omitted entirely, especially in casual, colloquial speech.

Another notable phonological feature of Poccasin English is, similarly to Bemé, the lack of phonemic voiced fricatives such as the /z/ or /ʒ/ in zoo and vision.

• Devoicing of /z/: /z/ is devoiced to /s/, so zoo and Sue become homophones.
• Affricatisation of /ʒ/: /ʒ/ is affricatised to /dʒ/, so ager and Asia can become homophones.

The rhoticity of Poccasin English is variable; see the corresponding section for more.

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	(ɜː)	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.

/ɜː/ only occurs as an allophone of /uː/ in open coda syllables, so zoo is pronounced /ˈsɜː/. In younger speakers this may be lowered further to an elongated schwa /əː/.

Rhoticity

Although traditionally considered a rhotic dialect, rhoticity in Poccasin English is in reality incredibly variable, and often dependent on speaker.

R-colored vowels in Poccasin English

English diaphoneme	Poccasin phoneme	Examples
/ɑːr/	[aɹ~aːɹ~aː]	barn, car, park
/ɛər/	[ɛɹ~ɛə]	bare, bear, there
/ɜːr/	[ɹ̩ː~ɛː]	burn, first, herd
/ər/	[əɹ~ɹ̩~ɛɹ]	better, martyr, doctor
/ɪər/	[iɹ~ijə~ija]	fear, peer, tier
/ɔːr/	[ɔɹ~oə̯~oi̯]	horse, born, north
	[uɹ]	hoarse, force, pork
/ʊər/	[uə̯~ua̯]	poor, sure, tour
/jʊər/	[jəɹ~juɹ]	cure, Europe, pure

Poccasin English is notable among most standard dialects of English for largely resisting the horse-hoarse merger, (also called the north-force merger) instead pronouncing the horse class as /ɔɹ/ (occasionally in some working class accents as /oə̯/ or /oi̯/) and the hoarse set as /uɹ/, which is contrasted with the /ʊər/ diaphoneme that is always pronounced non-rhotically as /uə̯/ or /ua̯/. The only exception to this rule is the conjunction or, which is largely always pronounced /ɔ~o/.

Vocabulary

Poccasin English incorporates various coinages and loanwords that are unique to the dialect or are only relevant in the context of the Poccasin Federation or Archipelago. These lexico-semantic innovations tend to have variable, unstandardised and typically eye dialect spellings.

• Cassinglish: the endonym of Poccasin English, most commonly used among Poccasin English speakers themselves to refer to the dialect. Compound of (Po)ccasin + English.
• Beme: the Poccasin Federation; by extension, the incumbent government of the Federation
• Dutchee: a German. In contrast, a Dutch person is called a Hollander. By extension, a Pennsylvania Dutch person is called a Penndutchee or Penn-dutchee.
• Creole: Bemé
• pulpee: a reference to Pulp Fiction (1994), a phenomenon that is widespread in Poccasin popular culture due to the popularity of the film.
• Binsencha or Vincentcha: Vincent Vega's (played by John Travolta) haircut. By extension, a Jheri curl such as the one worn by Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) is called a Julesie or Joolsie.