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 ...