My paper examines the writings of Egyptian writer, journalist, and poet ‘Abdallah Nadim “Al-Nadim” (1842-1896) on the relation between language, history, and education. I focus on a series of articles that Nadim published in his journal Al-Ustadh in 1892 and 1893, which offer a periodization of the history of Egypt based on the diffusion, shifts in prominence, and disappearance of various languages, beginning with the advent of Arabic, through the Mamluk and Ottoman rule, until the diffusion of European languages and the British occupation. My paper’s analysis is threefold. Firstly, I examine how Nadim’s linguistic periodization shaped his conceptions of the nature and role of the Arabic language, particularly in the realm of education, and its relation to other languages in Egypt overtime. I situate the author’s analysis with respect to, on the one hand, the traditional corpus of Arabic scholarship on linguistic studies and, on the other hand, the emergence of modern linguistics in the nineteenth century and novel conceptions of linguistic exchange and translation during the Nahda. I argue that Nadim’s privileging of the linguistic metaphor to comment on his country’s past and current culture and society should be read as symptomatic of a broader tendency to put language and theories of linguistic exchange at the center of intellectual and political discussions during this period. Secondly, I focus on Nadim’s style, particularly his use of a comically disproportionate number of loan words in Arabic. In line with the author’s distinctive satirical and playful writing mode, such programmatic linguistic hybridity within the monolingual space of the Arabic text, I propose, works to reaffirm stylistically his historical argument. Finally, I turn to Nadim’s propositions regarding the future development of culture and politics in Egypt, chiefly through education. Just as his interpretation of the past was “language-centric,” so was his vision of the future. In particular, I connect Nadim’s lifelong commitment to reforming education across Egypt and engagement in nationalist politics to his call, in these articles, for the need of promoting monolingual instruction at a time of widespread pushes for foreign language education in schools across Egypt. Ultimately, my paper seeks to shed light on the historical relation between language and history in the nineteenth and early twentieth century generally, and in Nadim’s works specifically, maintaining that his vision of Egypt’s linguistic future should be understood as a comprehensive project of political and cultural reform.