This paper focuses on the work of Syro-Lebanese intellectuals who took part in the First Arab Congress (al-Mu’tamar al-‘Arabi al-Awwal) of 1913, particularly that of Chekri Ghanim and Nadra Moutran. Many of these figures went on to advocate for a French advisory role in postwar Syria, and often gestured to language education as a means of strengthening commercial and cultural ties with Europe. At the time of the 1913 congress, however, they had called for a greater degree of autonomy for Arabs within the framework of Ottoman constitutionalism, and made reference to the dynamism of Nahda intellectual production as a justification for the recognition of Arabist political demands. What was the conception of language underwriting their visions of political reform? Existing scholarship focuses on these thinkers’ elaboration of important themes in a nascent Lebanese nationalist ideology, emphasizing their ties to exponents of French colonial expansion and their training in Jesuit institutions, and situating their work within currents of European thought on racial difference and social cohesion. It attends less to the ways in which they thought about the significance of language and linguistic diversity in a context marked by deep political uncertainty. By examining in closer detail these thinkers’ theorization of the relationship between language and community, without imposing a teleological reading that seeks to retrieve the origins of later iterations of nationalism, this paper contributes to a more nuanced understanding of Arab political thought on the eve of the postwar mandate settlement.