This paper explores the issue of vernacular Arabic through the particular lens of language learning books printed in Europe in the first half of the 19th century. Silvestre de Sacy’s instructional texts were widely-used in European academic circles to teach Arabic, but were of little use to students seeking to speak it. As the demand for scholars and diplomats who were proficient in vernacular Arabic surged in Europe, new tools and collaborations were undertaken to teach the spoken language. I draw in particular on three works: Claude-Étienne Savary’s Grammaire de la langue Arabe vulgaire et littérale (1813), Joseph Agoub’s Des règles de l'Arabe vulgaire (1823), and Muhammad ‘Ayyad al-Tantawi’s Traité de la langue Arabe vulgaire (1848). The textbooks were among the first to systematize the study of the vernacular, and offer insight into the policies and practices of language teaching on the one hand, and the language ideologies that underpin them on the other. More specifically, first, this paper identifies the language ideologies of these early ventures by examining their introductory and framing remarks about Arabic. How do the texts conceive of Arabic’s registers and configure them variously as spoken or written, and contemporary or ancient? How, at this early stage, do they classify and distinguish between the dialects, if at all? Second, I examine the selections from Arabic vernacular literary genres — including poetry, proverbs, riddles, letters, and folktales — that authors inserted and translated as examples bearing a purported didactic goal. The texts reveal the extent to which the meaning of vernacular Arabic was in flux at this point among European and Arab writers alike. It is precisely in this state of flux, or lack of standardization, that we can discern both the chaos and creativity with which authors endeavored to cull together their written archives’ of vernacular Arabic intended to aid the prospective student in its acquisition. Just as the success of these early textbooks in actually teaching the language is difficult to determine, the choice to teach vernacular Arabic alongside MSA and the methods used remains a matter of debate until today.