Multilingualism emerges as a robust and vibrant theme from the very beginning of My Ántonia (1918): the highly visible and eye-catching diacritical-capped Á of the title; the Latin epigraph from Virgil’s Georgics that precedes the novel’s introduction (“Optima dies ... prima fugit” [iii]); the authorial footnote in the first line of the first chapter, preempting unfamiliarity and intervening to govern the pronunciation of “Ań-ton-ee-ah”(3). Jim Burden’s first memory of his journey from Virginia to Nebraska involves a conductor with “cuff-buttons engraved with hieroglyphics” and who is “more inscribed than an Egyptian obelisk” (4). The first line of direct speech Jim recounts is a comment on multilingualism: the conductor tells Jim that “[t]hey can’t any of them speak English, except one little girl [Ántonia], and all she can say is ‘We go Black Hawk, Nebraska’” (4). From the reader’s very first encounters with the novel, we find ourselves in a material and narrative environment permeated by language diversity.

The first sample of speech Jim provides is especially illuminating. To the young Jim at the beginning of his journey west, this worldly and sophisticated conductor, traversing the separate train cars that segregate recent European immigrants from native-born and assimilated Americans, is an observer and arbiter of language. The passage affirms (American) English as the norming linguistic standard from the beginning of Jim and Ántonia’s shared journey, showcases Jim’s (and Cather’s) precise and subtle ear for dialect, and implicitly demonstrates how using and deciphering language simultaneously reveals and indexes social identities. After all, while pronouncing the immigrants’ English as lacking—“They can’t any of them speak English” (4)—the conductor also inadvertently reveals that his own variety of spoken English might also be considered dialectal and nonstandard.

Multilingualism—as a construct itself—resists any simple or flat definitions. Epistemological problems for language and human diversity per se notwithstanding, the processes involved with recognizing and categorizing named languages have always been fraught with problems concerning language standardization and intralingual, interpersonal complexity. And yet, observations, opinions, and experiences of language diversity are prevalent in almost all social groups, communities, and societies. As individuals, we are deftly attuned to recognize and adjust to differences in linguistic codes, interactional norms, discursive abilities, and communicative styles. We learn and adapt quickly according to our circumstances. We inherit and develop ideas, assumptions, and interpretations toward others’ communicative practices as part and parcel of our social life. As such, any specific observations about multilingualism necessarily depend upon dynamic analytical frameworks—whether academic or not, codified or not—that delimit our views and experiences of language, culture, and society.

Like her narrator Jim Burden, Cather was dislocated from Virginia and subsequently grew up in a cosmopolitan, multilingual Nebraska. In a 1913 interview with the Philadelphia Record, she recounts her early years: “We had very few American neighbors—they were mostly Swedes and Danes, Norwegians and Bohemians. ... Even when they spoke very little English, the old women somehow managed to tell me a great many stories about the old country” (F.H.). Situations where different named languages and dialects coexist in a shared context permeate Cather’s work and life: Thea Kronborg masters the languages of Western opera, Archbishop Jean Marie Latour experiences and contemplates Native American languages of the Southwest, and Cather herself, like Jim Burden, studied Latin and Greek. Cather also taught high school Latin and was well read in French. And yet, Cather’s multilingualism is much more complex than a cluster of named languages. As the opening passages of My Ántonia demonstrate, Cather had a keen ear for language diversity and wove it into her fiction in numerous ways. In this chapter I use the word multilingualism in broad senses: multilingualism can be observed within individual characters, such as in Ántonia’s Bohemian language and American English or Jim’s learning of Latin and Greek; it can be observed between characters in discourse, such as when the Burdens visit the Shimerdas or when Mr. Shimerda, Ántonia, and Jim visit the Russians; it exists as a material fact within the manuscript, such as the juxtapositions of the Latin Virgilian epigraph against English and other languages; it is presented through characters’ eye-dialect (deliberate nonstandard spellings or usage to emphasize phonological, syntactic, or social difference), such as in the direct speech of Ántonia, “Blind d’Arnault,” or even the train conductor. Finally, encapsulating these senses above, multilingualism might also be extended and interpreted in Bakhtinian heteroglossia terms, such as how Jim Burden’s narrative voice and Cather’s authorial voice are inherently merged from the novel’s onset, how Ántonia adopts momentarily, for her narrative purposes, specific characteristics of the suicidal tramp’s speech, or how Ántonia and Lena Lingard, though both immigrants, are presented differently in terms of their language proficiencies and developments. To this end, multilingualism can go beyond just the purely linguistic and extend to all aspects of the novel as discourse. Cather as author transfixes and deploys different forms and levels of multilingualism to engage her readership. Taking those together, I adopt for analytical purposes an ecological view of language and language diversity, treating multilingualism as a series of nested, interwoven, and interdependent levels of systems that are complex, adaptive, dynamic, and inseparable from the communities from which representations of multilingualism are configured.

First proposed by Einar Haugen in 1972, the concept of language ecologies adopts an extended metaphor from biology, treating languages as living species that live, grow, interact, change, evolve, and diminish, all through interactions among each other and with the environment. Analyzed as both psychological and sociological, language ecologies have become a useful approach in considering how languages are perceived and managed within a given context. One way to start is by identifying the named languages within a given context. The language ecology of My Ántonia in this view involves at least ten languages or dialects: (American) English, Bohemian, Russian, Norwegian, German, Black American Vernacular English (Ebonics), Italian, French, Latin, and Greek, as well as even Egyptian hieroglyphs and Hebrew. Also, within and between these language varieties, a conceptual framework that can be used to interpret language ecologies is Nancy Hornberger’s Continua of Biliteracy. The full framework is often used to analyze language policies and is beyond the scope of this chapter, but an important tenet of the framework is to treat contact between language varieties as points on a series of intersecting continua along the domains of language contexts, development, contact, and media. Through juxtaposition and accumulating examples, we can glean attitudes and ideologies involving multilingualism more generally as well as the relationships between specific languages, ultimately drawing conclusions about the language ecology as experienced by members of the language user groups.

Returning to the novel’s opening scene, we see that Jim tightly weaves the Shimerdas’ lack of English with a common association between foreignness and suspicion or discrimination. Declining the conductor’s suggestion to visit the immigrant train car, Jim retreats into his familiar Life of Jesse James (a quintessentially “American” dime novel likely written in colloquial American English), and his guardian Jake Marpole comments “approvingly” that “you were likely to get diseases from foreigners” (5). However, upon arrival in Nebraska, Jim is immediately drawn to the immigrant family’s speech by a sense of novelty rather than fear: “I pricked up my ears, for it was positively the first time I had ever heard a foreign tongue” (6). As the narrative unfolds, it is clear that Jim’s ears remain ever vigilant and attentive, and his prose reflects these perceptions, weaving together a rich tapestry of discursive interactions from his memories.

Before Jim recounts his first visit to the Shimerdas, he recalls an observation that suggests precisely how multilingualism is not just perceptions but has very tangible material consequences. On one hand, the Shimerdas must tolerate the mendacity of Peter Krajiek, a duplicitous fellow Bohemian immigrant who swindles them, simply because he is more proficient in English. On the other hand, however, Jim suggests that a possible remedy to this problem can also be solved through multilingualism: Austrian immigrant Otto Fuchs, who retains an “awkward” grasp of his native German (82), remarks that Mr. Shimerda knows some German and could potentially bypass Krajiek—but for the “natural distrust” Bohemians bear toward Austrians (19–20). Jim’s observations underscore how multilingualism moves beyond the abstract, arbitrary, and prescriptive sets of rules by which learners are measured and “standard” native speakers are imagined. Multilingualism necessarily adapts to the social and interactional needs of the specific situation in context, and it evolves as moments unfold and accumulate toward more complex understandings of human interactions.

The first time Jim officially meets Ántonia and her family is a careful and considered example of multilingualism at work. Even with limited proficiency, Mrs. Shimerda’s energetic speech manages to convey the desperation of her circumstances: “Very glad, very glad!” (21), “House no good, house no good!” (22), “Much good, much thank!” (22). Jim also observes how his grandmother, on her part, “always spoke in a very loud tone to foreigners, as if they were deaf” (22), highlighting again how foreignness is often instinctively perceived as Other and deficient. The first explicit act of interlingual translation occurs during this visit, when Mrs. Shimerda asks Krajiek to interpret for her in an attempt to quell any apprehensions about her disabled son Marek and to praise her older, favored boy Ambrosch (23). These interactions set the stage for a distinct contrast to Ántonia’s first interaction with Jim. While Ántonia shares her mother’s impulsiveness and voraciousness, she is unlike her mother in other important facets of temperament. Ántonia is joyous, intuitive, curious, and generous. She immediately starts to build interpersonal connections through a shared appreciation of nature, manifesting her eagerness to absorb the local language. As Jim recalls,

Ántonia pointed up to the sky and questioned me with her glance. I gave her the word, but she was not satisfied and pointed to my eyes. I told her, and she repeated the word, making it sound like “ice.” She pointed up to the sky, then to my eyes, then back to the sky, with movements so quick and impulsive that she distracted me, and I had no idea what she wanted. She got up on her knees and wrung her hands. She pointed to her own eyes and shook her head, then to mine and to the sky, nodding violently.

“Oh,” I exclaimed, “blue; blue sky.”

She clapped her hands and murmured, “Blue sky, blue eyes,” as if it amused her. While we snuggled down there out of the wind she learned a score of words. She was quick, and very eager. (25–26)

This passage, delineating the start of Jim and Ántonia’s lifelong friendship, illustrates an important insight into multilingualism: some named languages may be more dominant, but imbalances need not be barriers. Experience and meaning remain constantly negotiated and co-constructed through shared interaction. Ántonia instinctively focuses on nature to transcend linguistic barriers, highlighting her eagerness to engage with and integrate herself into her new country, and as such, by the end of this interaction, her English has already progressed far beyond the likely memorized chunk “We go Black Hawk, Nebraska” (4). Ántonia has already begun to demonstrate and develop her unique voice, co-creating with Jim the multilingual narratives of their lives. And although Mr. Shimerda inaugurates this process formally by handing Jim’s grandmother a bilingual primer and pleading, “Te-e-ach, te-e-ach my Án-tonia!” (27), Ántonia’s absorption of English seems to come about less through book-learning than through social practice in a community of multiple languages and dialects.

With help from Jim, Ántonia’s English continues to develop. Her eagerness to communicate, buoyed by practical support, accelerates her learning. In a matter of a few short months, Ántonia has become capable of delivering substantial pieces of discourse, for example: “My papa find friends up north, with Russian mans. Last night he take me for see, and I can understand very much talk. Nice mans, Mrs. Burden. One is fat and all the time laugh. Everybody laugh. The first time I see my papa laugh in this kawn-tree. Oh, very nice!” (31–32). From a linguistic development perspective, Jim’s/Cather’s eye-dialect of an English learner is spot on: the overgeneralization of plural nouns, the not fully mastered subject-verb agreement and verb tenses, and the occasional pronunciation variation all reflect substantial, realistic progress. However, the effects of depicting Ántonia’s language development move beyond the orthography of the eye-dialect; her singular, gregarious character continues to stand out, and the vivid details of her memory, her self-expression, and her care for her father continue to bridge the foreign and the familiar. Soon afterward, Ántonia is able to interpret for Jim, which in turn helps to build Jim’s relationships with the Russians and Mr. Shimerda: “My tatinek say when you are big boy, he give you his gun,” Ántonia interprets, as her father speaks to Jim with a “far-away look.” “Very fine, from Bohemie. It was belong to a great man, very rich, like what you not got here; many fields, many forests, many big house. My papa play for his wedding, and he give my papa fine gun, and my papa give you” (40). In contrast to the more conventional use of eye dialect in literature to encase characters in stereotype, Cather’s depictions of Ántonia’s evolving skills continue to showcase her unique character. Ántonia does not just assimilate into American society; she plays a vital role in how this community of multilingualism, formed in the New World, forges shared connections with the Old.

As the novel progresses, these connections are continuously changing and becoming more complex. As Jim and Ántonia’s friendship deepens, they continue to explore the New World, but this does not mean that conflicting ideologies about language and identity disappear. A contentious moment emerges during the snake crisis, after a terrified Ántonia shouts at Jim in Bohemian, frightened by the rattler. Jim’s accusatory “What did you jabber Bohunk for?” (44) underscores a realistic point: that their default languages, the ones they use by instinct, are still different. Jim’s impulsive, annoyed reaction here calls attention to how English, the lingua franca, is favored and dominant in their relationship and how Ántonia’s native Bohemian is still stereotyped negatively (the term Bohunk is derogatory), judged as Other and a stumbling block when communication breaks down.

Most of the time, though, multilingualism creates synergy, and one of the most prominent examples can be found in the story of Peter and Pavel. The horrific tale of the wedding party is unburdened by Pavel in a variety of Russian “not very different from Bohemian” (33), interpreted by Ántonia, and finally set onto the page by Jim. Moving away for a short while from direct speech and eye-dialect, Cather uses her text to demonstrate how, in America, diverse repertoires of language resources (Russian, Bohemian/Czech, English) are pooled together to reinterpret and co-construct meaning and memory in the standard English of her unfurnished style. By filtering the story through these multiple languages, Cather evokes the immigrants’ history and experiences of the Old World as haunted and tragic, distant and fading. Jim concludes his retelling by fusing these received memories of the Old World with his own in the New: “At night, before I went to sleep, I often found myself in a sledge drawn by three horses, dashing through a country that looked something like Nebraska and something like Virginia” (59). These connections are achieved only through the shared multilingualism of Jim, Ántonia, and her fellow immigrants.

Thus far, Ántonia’s English development has enabled Jim to connect with the Old World, but over time Ántonia becomes more and more capable, and Cather’s eye-dialect demonstrates how Ántonia also becomes capable of reinterpreting her own experiences in America—in English. In about three years, by the time she is working for the Harlings, Ántonia’s multilingualism is so versatile that she can overtake the narration, if only briefly. Jim/Cather uses Ántonia’s own voice in full to retell the story of the tramp’s suicide, quoted here in part:

“He comes right up and begins to talk like he knows me already. He says: ‘The ponds in this country is done got so low a man could n’t drownd himself in one of ’em.’

“I told him nobody wanted to drownd themselves, but if we did n’t have rain soon we’d have to pump water for the cattle.

“‘Oh, cattle,’ he says, ‘you’ll all take care of your cattle! Ain’t you got no beer here?’ I told him he’d have to go to the Bohemians for beer; the Norwegians did n’t have none when they thrashed. ‘My God!’ he says, ‘so it’s Norwegians now, is it? I thought this was Americy.’” (172)

Even in this short excerpt, it is clear that Ántonia’s English is now so proficient that she presents very few nonstandard markers of her own. What is even more impressive (and realistic) is how she is now able to perform the nonstandard linguistic features of others, in this case the tramp’s. Her imitation of the tramp’s use of “drownd” and “Americy” is not only perceptive and handsome storytelling, it unsettles commonly held expectations and stereotypes. Specifically, the tramp’s comment about immigrants allows Ántonia’s audience to read him as “American” (like the Burdens and Harlings), but simultaneously, by way of Ántonia’s linguistic mimicry, it is the tramp, not Ántonia, who is presented as Other. This reversal highlights further not only Ántonia’s linguistic and narrative skills but also her strong metalinguistic knowledge gleaned from experiences in her adopted country. This example of multilingualism draws a contrast to Jim’s retelling of the Russians’ story, which emerges from Ántonia’s translations but relegates her narrative role to the background. Here Ántonia’s first-person narration, delivered with full fluency, is jarring, immediate, and vital. As such, Cather demonstrates how multilingual development repositions, reshapes, and even transforms the nuances of social identities.

As Ántonia’s English development reaches this pinnacle, Jim’s narration gradually shifts in focus, and as Ántonia and Jim’s lives begin to further diverge, the text also carves out a different pattern of individual multilingualism. Ántonia, an eastern European immigrant, is of the lower working class and cannot receive formal schooling, but she is compelled by her circumstances to move beyond her native Bohemian to develop English as a second language. Her progression exemplifies what sociolinguists sometimes term “folk bilingualism”; Jim, an American by birth, is of a higher social class and able to pursue formal and higher education, thus achieving literacy in English, Latin, and Greek. It is from here that the Virgil epigraph of the novel emerges. Jim’s development is what is termed, by contrast, “elite bilingualism.” Each of their paths is well traveled in U.S. history, and Cather’s novel marshals both and juxtaposes them to depict a vision of a multilingual, transnational America.

After Jim leaves to start his university education, his depictions of multilingualism move away from eye-dialect and become more descriptive and literary. Jim recalls how he studies Latin with Gaston Cleric and works on his Greek—a period of personal intellectual enlightenment. Jim recounts several aspects of Cleric’s erudition and temperament, including how they discuss Dante and Virgil, yet curiously, while Jim goes into considerable detail about the manner and style of Cleric’s speech, Cleric barely has any direct speech in the novel. The multilingualism Jim shares with Cleric, as well as the reader’s experience of multilingualism, are distinctly different here from what Jim shares and depicts with Ántonia. The two men meet on the page through literary languages, and it is here that Jim translates the Virgilian epigraph, that “the best days are the first to flee” (256). This newly developed repertoire allows Jim to more fully reinterpret the memories of his childhood. What Cather achieves here is a continuation of how she builds connections from the New World to the Old—in this case, through the inheritance of literary multilingualism, which simultaneously contrasts with the immigrants’ lived experiences and lends mythical weight to them.

The one character who bridges these two types of multilingualism is Lena Lingard. Just as Ántonia’s multilingualism helps Jim form connections with the Russians and the Shimerdas, Lena’s multilingualism allows Jim to gain insight into Ole Benson, who is known generally for not conversing much but would speak in Norwegian to Lena (273–74). Like Ántonia, Lena comes from an immigrant farming family and arrives in town as a “hired girl” to work. She also arrived in America as a young girl and had to learn English. However, unlike Ántonia, Lena Lingard appears in the novel fully proficient in English. One might argue that perhaps this is due to Lena being slightly older than Ántonia or because she is set to work in a shop rather than a household (which would suggest that she interacts with many more people and is required to adapt faster), but from the day Lena arrives in town, her English is portrayed as indistinguishable from that of nonimmigrants. Furthermore, nearly all the other immigrant characters present eye-dialect features in their speech, even if they are proficient. Lena’s direct speech never shows markers of eye-dialect, even in Jim’s retrospective descriptions of their earlier years. This is also not because Cather never depicts a Scandinavian accent (she does for Mrs. Lee, Lou Bergson’s mother-in-law in O Pioneers!, for example). It is perhaps a conscious narrative choice to idealize Lena in a different way from Ántonia. Lena is the childhood friend with whom Jim shares high culture; they go to the theater together, and Jim is affected by Lena’s responses. Also, after Lena’s visit to Jim’s residence, he finds himself revisualizing Lena in one of his old erotic dreams, now reinterpreted and captioned with “the mournful line: Optima dies ... prima fugit” (262). Experiences and memories of Lena prompt Jim to synthesize his childhood and young adult experiences.

Furthermore, while Lena’s English never shows eye-dialect markers, Jim devotes an entire paragraph to parsing the appealing blend of foreignness and conventionality in her speech:

Lena’s talk always amused me. Ántonia had never talked like the people about her. Even after she learned to speak English readily, there was always something impulsive and foreign in her speech. But Lena had picked up all the conventional expressions she heard at Mrs. Thomas’s dressmaking shop. Those formal phrases, the very flower of small-town proprieties, and the flat commonplaces, nearly all hypocritical in their origin, became very funny, very engaging, when they were uttered in Lena’s soft voice, with her caressing intonation and arch naïveté. Nothing could be more diverting than to hear Lena, who was almost as candid as Nature, call a leg a “limb” or a house a “home.” (272–73)

It is therefore precisely through comparative observations of Ántonia’s and Lena’s multilingual experiences that Jim appreciates both the diversity of his childhood community and both characters’ unique characteristics. By thinking and writing in these heteroglossic ways, Cather (by way of Jim) continues to deepen and complexify a shared history, at once making the novel a unique achievement of (language) diversity in Nebraska as well as an emblem of American social life, an idealized nation-state that easily shifts between the rural and the urban, farming/working-class experiences and academic/high cultures, the New World and the Old.

My Ántonia celebrates nature, diversity, and change, which makes it an apt subject on which to apply the concept of language ecologies. As with any biological ecology, the lives and rhythms of a language ecology are neither static nor linear. Individuals’ and groups’ language use is constantly subject to change, and successive generations become part of the ecology by experiencing their own development and learning. Jim’s memories of his first visit with Ántonia’s family after being many years apart depict these changes with subtlety and beauty.

By the time Jim reunites with Ántonia two decades later, she is married to a Bohemian named Anton Cuzak and has a large family. Jim arrives at their home and hears, in a callback to the opening train station scene, the sounds of children speaking “in a language I had not heard for a long while” (319). The Cuzak family speaks Czech among themselves, but this time around, Jim’s narration highlights familiarity, not strangeness. What is also different is how the English direct speech of all the Cuzak children is not in eye-dialect but standard—this is a new generation of children raised and going to school in America. The multilingualism here, if only briefly, appears to value both Czech and English equally. It is a picture of America that can be interpreted as more integrated and equal, or perhaps as a relic of a particular time and place that is quickly fading. In an emphasis of this latter interpretation, we encounter an older Ántonia at a further stage of her language development, such that even as the names of their shared past are revived, the English context of those names is gradually fading. Ántonia introduces her daughter to Jim:

“She’s Nina, after Nina Harling,” Ántonia explained. “Ain’t her eyes like Nina’s? I declare, Jim, I loved you children almost as much as I love my own. These children know all about you and Charley and Sally, like as if they’d grown up with you. I can’t think of what I want to say, you’ve got me so stirred up. And then, I’ve forgot my English so. I don’t often talk it any more. I tell the children I used to speak real well.” She said they always spoke Bohemian at home. The little ones could not speak English at all—did n’t learn it until they went to school. (324)

The return of slightly nonstandard usage such as “I’ve forgot” and “I don’t often talk it [English],” paired with Ántonia’s own reflection on how her English has faded due to lack of use, highlights how multilingualism (from both individual and collective perspectives) is context dependent, dynamic, adaptive, and therefore nonlinear. Varieties gain or lose prominence; they grow, evolve, and diminish; they move along various continua. And yet, there is a shared history that has been shaped by what came before. Jim presents Ántonia and her family now not as othered, as when they were children, but as just as American as himself, to the point where he even claims shared heritage of the family’s language and culture:

“Show him the spiced plums, mother. Americans don’t have those,” said one of the older boys. “Mother uses them to make kolaches,” he added.

Leo, in a low voice, tossed off some scornful remark in Bohemian.

I turned to him. “You think I don’t know what kolaches are, eh? You’re mistaken, young man. I’ve eaten your mother’s kolaches long before that Easter day when you were born.” (328)

According to the Oxford English Dictionary and the Dictionary of American Regional English, these direct, translingual uses of the word kolaches demarcate the introduction of the word kolach or kolache into the English language (Jewell 72–73). Earlier, in O Pioneers! (1913), Cather uses a more generalized description for the kolaches: Marie Shabata presents “a pan of delicate little rolls, stuffed with stewed apricots, and began to dust them over with powdered sugar” (175). Since Cather adopts the original Czech word, without explanation, in My Ántonia, we might say that the language ecologies of which Cather and her readers are a part have evolved as well. Cather implicitly advocates for a cosmopolitan, multicultural America in which multilingualism is commonplace—not a society in which everything becomes “Americanized.”

Cather’s multilingualism developed over time. Her first published work of fiction, “Peter” (1892), a prototype story for My Ántonia, opens with the conversation of a father-son immigrant duo. Cather chooses a register of English that evokes the style of the King James Bible to stand in for the foreign language, differentiating the code by suggesting that the immigrants’ speech is “older”: “No, Antone, I have told thee many times, no, thou shalt not sell [the old fiddle] until I am gone.” Before Peter commits suicide, Cather’s narration tells us that he “said brokenly all the Latin he had ever known, ‘Pater noster, qui in coelum est.’” In “Peter,” Cather does not yet present the subtle, mature forms of eye-dialect of My Ántonia, but her heightened register for foreign language and the Latin prayer quote, like her depictions in My Ántonia, already suggest the dignity and cultivation of American immigrants from the Old World.

In The Song of the Lark (1915), the novel directly preceding My Ántonia, Cather (while still not using much eye-dialect), presents language diversity by juxtaposing English with other languages in direct speech, as in the character of Professor Wunsch. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the year 1916, during which Cather first wrote to her brother Roscoe about her idea for My Ántonia, was also the year when the word multilingualism first appeared in print. The historical context therefore aligns with Cather’s developments in multilingualism in her fiction. In the midst of a world war, when foreign language education policies were a hot topic for national debate and anti-immigrant sentiments were on the rise, My Ántonia, with its eye-dialect and direct borrowing of kolaches, is Cather’s multilingual argument for presence and diversity, an adamant rebuke of the contemporary “Americanization” debate.[1]

As Cather’s career progressed, her uses of multilingualism continued to evolve. In “Neighbour Rosicky” (1930/1932), a work that can be read as a “sequel” to My Ántonia, Anton Rosicky emerges from the outset as someone fluent in English, but his speech is presented in eye-dialect throughout the story: “So? No, I guess my heart was always pretty good. I got a little asthma, maybe. Just a awful short breath when I was pitchin’ hay last summer, dat’s all” (7). The purpose of the eye-dialect is not to stereotype but to add depth and uniqueness to his character. Furthermore, presented with the same dignity and respect for the immigrant pioneers of the prairie as in My Ántonia, “Neighbour Rosicky” takes multilingualism in America further still. Rudolph, Anton’s son, marries an “American girl,” Polly, who does not speak the Czech family language. Despite Rosicky’s best efforts to embrace and include Polly in family rituals (Cather’s narration highlights how Rosicky actively chooses English over Czech in storytelling, for example), the conclusion of the novella leaves behind both grief and foreboding. Anton Rosicky, of the pioneer generation, does not live long enough to pass on the family language and culture to his unborn grandchild. His son Rudolph appears progressively distant from his inherited language and culture, with the lingering possibility of seeking a more modern, industrial, and urban (read, in part, “Americanized”) future for his family—a transition of which Rosicky would disapprove. At this level of analysis, Cather’s multilingualism changes from active to diminished presence. And though this image of American multiculturalism is still presented as poised, subtle, beautiful, and nostalgic, it evolves with time, from hopeful to apprehensive.

Multilingualism stays in Cather’s work till the end of her life and career. Having mastered her particular brand of eye-dialect, Cather reaches further back into her childhood past and writes Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), her last novel, applying her keen dialectal ear once more to present unique voices and distinct registers in the Black American Vernacular English of late nineteenth-century Virginia. Unlike the mostly satirizing Mark Twain, the documentation-oriented William Dean Howells, or the more cryptic William Faulkner, Cather, under the judgment of Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, demonstrates “urgency and anxiety in [her] rendering of black characters” (14). In her problematizing of critical consensus surrounding Sapphira and the Slave Girl, Morrison concludes that “Cather returns to a very personal, indeed private experience. ... [She] works out and toward the meaning of female betrayal as it faces the void of racism. She may not have arrived safely, like Nancy, but to her credit she did undertake the dangerous journey” (28). Part of why Morrison experiences Cather’s “urgency” and gives her credit for her undertaking, I suspect, is Cather’s mature and deft use of eye-dialect, her rendering of the subtleties in language diversity inherent in regional and Black American English.

In “The Novel Démeublé” (1922), Cather’s treatise on fiction writing, she opens by claiming that “we take it for granted whoever can observe, and can write the English language, can write a novel. Often the latter qualification is considered unnecessary” (5). Farther down, she famously writes, “Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there—that, it seems to me, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself” (6). The distinctly musical language and the extralinguistic descriptors Cather uses here are well suited to conclude this brief unsettling of her multilingualism. As Cather continued to adapt to a rapidly changing America and a world torn apart by war, she continuously expanded and refined her presentations of the diverse language ecologies that made up her world. The effects of these presentations of multilingualism, both as concretely named and depicted language varieties and as deftly rendered eye-dialect, can be “felt upon the page,” as the “over-tone divined by the ear,” creating “the verbal mood” and “the emotional aura” (6). These effects, like all effects of discourse, are not readily summarized but must be experienced through accumulation over time. As Cather reached further and further back into her own life, as she moved through a diversity of cultures and language variations in her life and career, she continued to marshal her own brand of multilingualism as a means to review, refine, and reimagine “the precious, the incommunicable past” (360).