In 1991, ethno-linguistic federalism was introduced in Ethiopia by the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) as a (limited) political response to long-standing questions around linguistic and ethnic identities that had caused the Ethiopian Civil War in the 1970s and 1980s. The EPRDF proposed a ‘multilingual’ language policy, a move which evoked mixed reactions from speakers of different languages. At the forefront of this debate were the Amhara political elites and academicians who accused the EPRDF government of weakening national unity by promoting ethnic identities. In the meantime, the influence of the policy is palpable in the works of Amharic creatives, particularly novelists and songwriters. This chapter draws on Amharic literary tradition and the music industry to show how texts written in Amharic have been opened up to embrace multilingual realities. It specifically presents cases from an Amharic village novel (Evangadi [1998] by Fikremarkos Desta) and popular songs (‘Teregagi’ [2016] by Tsinat Lisanu and ‘Maaloo Intaloo’ [2017] by Abush Zeleke) to examine how and why multilingual realities and practices are represented in these Amharic texts, and the implications for the study of multilingualism in Ethiopia.