This is a collaborative, multidisciplinary project examining the role of language ideologies in cultural and political discourses of modernity and modernization in and around the Middle East in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We bring together historians, literary scholars, linguists, anthropologists, and sociologists to jointly study the articulation, circulation, and mobilization of ideas about language death and revival, language reform, and language modernization in the contexts of empire, emerging nationalisms, and a modernized or quickly modernizing world. We also examine the role of developments in linguistics, philology, and adjacent disciplines in informing and shaping such ideas. Some of the questions that animate the discourses this project examines are: what does it mean for a language to be or become a modern language? Can, and should, a dead language be revived? Some of the questions the project leaders ask are: how do notions of native tongue, language family, vernacular dialect or register interact with concepts such as empire, nation, motherland? What role, if any, did language reformers think sacred languages should play? How does the relation between language and the body figure in projects of (re)generation of modern polities and individuals? By studying authors who spoke and wrote in a variety of languages of the Eastern Mediterranean, and their interaction with the political and cultural bodies and movements that played important roles in shaping the modern Middle East, this project aims to reconstruct, and draw new insights about, the rich nexus of language, identity, and modernity.