In encouraging a canonization of the Arabic literary heritage through print, the Nahda prioritized fusha, a pure, eloquent, literary Arabic. While popular genres used colloquial (‘ammiyya) Arabic in drama and dialogues in journals, scholarship and prestigious literatures were written and printed in a standardized literary Arabic. In this paper, I examine intellectual curiosity legitimating language hybridity and heteroglossia in print as a part of the trends of the Nahda. In Baghdad, the editor of the journal Lughat al-‘Arab (“The Arabic Language”) Father Anastas Mari al-Karmili, together with his chief staff writer Razuq ‘Isa, took on the issue of language. While the journal’s typeface is bilingual (French and Arabic), the editorial staff addresses diglossia through accepting both literary and colloquial Arabic language as contributing to Arab cultural heritage and Iraqi regional present and future. In this paper, I argue that the articles concerning etymologies embrace classical Arabic and its history. Furthermore, I argue that the articles containing glossaries of Baghdadi colloquialisms, Arabic portmanteaux, and proverbs unique to Iraq due to the presence of Syriac and Ottoman Turkish words all support the recording of colloquial Arabic for scholarship and as a part of a prestigious literary journal. Colloquial Baghdadi Arabic becomes legitimated by analyzing the opinion pieces inquiring into the permissibility of writing in vernacular Arabic alongside the other articles in eloquent prose and neoclassical poetry as well as the collection and examination of colloquialisms. Through reframing some of the producers, print channels, and consumers of the Nahda as engaging with more than literary Arabic, this study acknowledges the imperial Ottoman context in which the print culture arose and the local Baghdadi context that is preserved in the language, both of which exhibited their own multilingualisms and diglossias. While language questions were central to the Nahda, this continual investigation into the Arabic languages and presentation of it paves the way for later print works in colloquial Arabic, in Baghdad and beyond.