The linguistic ideas of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (Argentina, 1811–1888), while never stated as an organized whole in his copious Complete Works, occupy a central position in his thought on social organization, education, and the advance of what he called ‘civilization’. While he never proposed to analyze ‘language’ in a systematic way, Sarmiento’s linguistic ideas reveal a surprising intuition. This study attempts to trace some of these reflections, emphasizing materials produced in the period 1841–1843, when Sarmiento participated in a lively polemic motivated, in part, by the controversy of whether or not to break with Peninsular models. Sarmiento found the Spanish language incapable of providing a prestige dialect, since it was the reflection of an inert culture. He strove to distinguish between a language and the graphic symbols which represent it, and to find American prestige linguistic models. Seeing language as a dynamic construct with variations through time, place, and social level, Sarmiento anticipates modern descriptivist and pragmatic theories. He also proposes that the basis of language education is reading, and supports both foreign language teaching and massive translation of foreign texts. Sarmiento’s dismissal of Spain as a literary and linguistic model softened over the years, beginning with the period of ‘codification’ seen between 1843 and 1849. By the period 1879–1883, Sarmiento acknowledged Bello’s great contribution. The Argentine thinker is seen in the context of the Argentine Generation of 1837 whose Naturalistic-Romantic concept of language evolved into a Darwinian positivism.