Traditional explanations of the new nationalisms arising in the nineteenth-century Otttoman empire as inspired by European romanticism, in particular the work of the German philosopher Herder, are unsatisfactory for both chronological and conceptual reasons. More recently, Karen Barkey, has argued that this rise should be explained in terms of newly emerging regional networks and alliances; but her analysis fails to account for the specifically nationalist forms many of these new networks assumed. Here, I would like to argue that the roots of nineteenth-century nationalisms lie in the eighteenth century, when, in public spaces like coffee houses and medreses, new simplified varieties and new public and literate usages emerged, both of existing languages of (religious) learning and administration, like Turkish, Greek, and Armenian, and of vernacular languages hitherto only spoken, like Albanian and Kurdish. But not only does one encounter new kinds of language usage in these spaces; one also finds new attitudes to, or ideologies of, spoken vernacular languages. It appears that these changes in language usage and ideology were driven primarily by an internal Ottoman dynamic, rather than inspired by movements abroad or triggered by outside interference. They also reflect societal developments that occurred largely independently from official government policies, such as the nineteenth-century reform of the millet system. Among Christian Ottoman subject peoples, the rise of new vernaculars primarily amounted to a reaction against the dominant status, or linguistic hegemony, of language varieties like Church Greek and classical Armenian (Grabar) in religious education and administration; among Muslims, this vernacularization process primarily concerned the rise of new languages of instruction in medreses (like Kurdish and Albanian) and in poetry of religious learning. I will base my claims on both literary and grammatical texts from the period, with an emphasis on materials from relatively marginal and/or underexplored languages, like Albanian, Armenian, and Kurdish. By taking an explicitly comparative approach, we may discover patterns explaining the emergence – or demise – of particular languages in the age of emerging nationalisms that go beyond conventional nationalist narratives of oppression and liberation, and get a rather more differentiated picture of the complex linguistic and ethnic reconfigurations of the period.