While most of the scholarly focus on the Nahda (Arabic cultural revival) is anchored in the Eastern Mediterranean cities of Cairo and Beirut, Arabic cultural production also occurred outside—yet connected to—these hubs, such as in the Iraqi cities. I place the Nahda within late-19th and early-20th century Ottoman networks, wherein the circulation of ideas, print, and people was already established to facilitate imperial political, cultural, and intellectual currents. Moreover, I assert, that there is a centrality to the borderlands. Rather than being ‘peripheral’ to the production of Ottoman and/or Arabic culture, the intellectuals of Iraq at the Ottoman frontier, exemplify Nahda trends, and it is due to their conscious linguistic versatility. This paper examines two overlapping, seemingly-contradictory Nahda trends. The first is the reinforcement of the fasih (‘pure’ literary) Arabic past by writing the ever-growing history of Arabic literature and language. The second is the tension between ‘vernacularization’ in Arabic, where colloquial dialects are used for new literary purposes, and ‘governmentalization’ of Arabic, where the local dialects receive standardization. While both buttress Arabic, both require translation and intra-lingual mediation. First, I analyze two different approaches to the canonization of Arabic literary history and fusha (literary language) by comparing the works of two Baghdadi poet-intellectuals Fahmi al-Mudarris and Ma‘ruf al-Rusafi. Both men were fluent writers of Arabic and Ottoman Turkish. Both had lived in Istanbul and Baghdad. Each delivered a series of lectures on the history of Arabic literature and language, but al-Mudarris’ Tarih-i edebiyat-i arabiye (The History of Arabic Literature) was in Ottoman Turkish and al-Rusafi’s Durus fi tarikh adab al-lugha al-‘arabiyya (Studies in the History of the Arabic Literary Language) was in Arabic. I examine their Arabic literary histories together to highlight the effects of translation across Arabic and Ottoman Turkish in their narrations, and I inquire into the physical translation between imperial capital and Iraq. Second, I turn to the act of recording the Arabic vernacular. The Baghdadi journal Lughat al-‘Arab (“The Arabic Language”) published and edited by Father Anastas Mari al-Karmili printed a series on the colloquial language spoken in Baghdad. Razuq ‘Isa excavates time, space, myth, religion, imperium, and colonial influence to identify the forms and the richness of Baghdadi Arabics, and how they are spoken and should be written. Together, these two cases reveal multilingualism, translation, and diglossia present within the Nahda cultural production in late-Ottoman Iraq.