Mobilian Jargon

Mobilian Jargon

This article relates to Cahokia Jazz

Joe Barrow, the protagonist of Francis Spufford's Cahokia Jazz, does not speak the titular city's common language, Anopa. He learns bits and pieces of it over the course of the novel, at around the same pace as the reader (heeding the suggestion of his friend Alan Jacobs, Spufford does not include a glossary). We learn the words for Native, Black, and white people (takouma, taklousa, and takata); the word for "warrior," which is the preferred title for Cahokia police officers (tastanagi); the word for "chief," in this context referring to the chief of police (miko).

As Spufford explains in the Notes and Acknowledgements at the end of Cahokia Jazz, Anopa became "something like a Swahili for the whole indigenous population at the continent's center" in the world of the novel, a "synthetic, fully formed language." Essentially, Anopa is what might have happened if Mobilian Jargon, once the lingua franca of Indigenous populations along the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico, had been able to develop more freely.

While Mobilian Jargon was named after the Indigenous tribe French colonists called the Mobile (near the area now known as Mobile, Alabama), the language was actually largely based on the Chickasaw and Choctaw languages, with various loanwords from other tribes (such as the Algonquin further north) and from French, Spanish, and English traders and colonizers. At its peak, Mobilian Jargon was spoken from Georgia to Eastern Texas, and as far north as Missouri (not far from the location of the real Cahokia, an ancient city that now exists as ruins near St. Louis).

Just as Mobilian Jargon lightly modified words from other Indigenous languages, Anopa lightly modifies Mobilian. "Takouma," the Anopa word for Native Americans, literally means "red man"; in Mobilian, that would be "atak hommá." The same goes for "taklousa" and "atak lusa" ("black man") and "takata" and "atak hata" ("white man"). The Man of the Sun, the ceremonial monarch of Cahokia, is referred to as "Hashi," much like Mobilian's word for the sun, "haši." (The Mobilian word for the moon is also "haši"; perhaps to avoid confusion, the Man of the Sun's niece and heir apparent, the Moon, is known by part of her given name, Couma.)

By 1922 in the novel, Anopa has developed into its own language, one that Spufford describes in the Notes and Acknowledgements as "suitable for…modernist poetry." Unfortunately, Mobilian did not get the chance to evolve so fully; Spufford goes on to say that the last people familiar with the jargon were "elderly Native Americans in Louisiana in the 1980s." It's heartening, then, that Mobilian plays such a central role in a book that crackles with life, allowing it, in some form, to thrive once again.

Cahokia Mounds, all that remains of Cahokia, courtesy of Skubasteve834 CC BY-SA 3.0

Filed under Places, Cultures & Identities

This "beyond the book article" relates to Cahokia Jazz. It originally ran in March 2024 and has been updated for the February 2025 paperback edition. Go to magazine.