Writers of the modern Arab Renaissance, or al-nahda al-'arabiyya, engaged in a varied and highly contentious debate about the nature of language and identity. In the autumn of 1919, the pioneering Cairo-based newspaper Al-Hilal announced the circulation of a survey on the future of the Arabic language. Sixteen thinkers and men of letters responded to the survey, submitting articles that were published in al-Hilal through April 1920. In January 1928, Damascus Academy founding member ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Maghribi published a proposal in that institution’s flagship journal on the subject of words not found in the canonical Arabic dictionaries (al-kalimat ghayr al-qamusiyya), eliciting the responses of eighteen fellow members of the Academy (no women were invited to participate in either survey.) Both surveys relate to the future of the Arabic language and represent intellectuals’ attempts to protect, reform, augment, and police its content. Both followed major upheavals in their host countries and in the region: the Egyptian Revolution of 1919 and the inauguration of the Mandate system at Versailles for the first, the French Mandatory power’s crushing of the Great Syrian Revolt 1925-1927 for the second. This paper finds that the surveyed thinkers expressed widely diverging views as to authority over the language and its development; the impact of the West (and its languages) upon the Arab world (and its language/s); the present generation’s links to and valuation of the multiple Arab and Islamic pasts; and the relations between the educated elite (al-khassa) and everyone else (al-‘amma.) As such, the Nahda-era debate dealt with language as a more complex object of attention than is generally recognized, while involving themes of historical import beyond language itself.