In 1940, Africa published ‘Nyanja Linguistic Problems’ by T. Price. It serves as an example of the articles on African languages that this journal carried in its early volumes. Such articles were rarely purely descriptive accounts of particular languages but contained, as in Price’s article, profound reflections on language ideologies. Short on conceptual or philosophical elaboration, these articles hardly get singled out for special mention as the journal celebrates its first 90 years. However, Price’s observations 78 years ago compel further reflections on language ideologies in Africa. One of his main concerns was to point out that what had come to be known as ‘Nyanja’ scarcely existed as a commonly accepted linguistic form – whether among its African speakers or those Europeans who participated in its codification and development. Even S. Y. Nthara’s Nthondo, awarded the IAI Essay Prize in the 1930s, was written in a dialect ‘many literate Nyanja will scarcely admit to be in their tongue’. The root problem for Price was ‘the psychological aversion which each group of dialect-speakers has from adopting any of the other existing forms of the language’. Price’s own sceptical remarks on attempts to introduce a ‘Union Nyanja’ and the subsequent state-sponsored promotion of Chichewa in independent Malawi throw more light on such problems. However, 78 years after the article was published, it may be freshly topical to revisit Malawi 50 years before its publication. David Clement Scott of Blantyre Mission was then engaged in foundational linguistic work on the basis of a language ideology largely oblivious to the problems identified by Price. Not only did he draw freely upon diverse linguistic forms brought to his attention by speakers scattered by migration and slave-raiding, he was also passionate about linguistic equality, including vis-à-vis Greek and Hebrew, of the kind rarely seen in Malawi ever since. As such, his short-lived language ideology in the late 19th century throws the problems discussed by Price into starker relief and poses the question of whether we in the 21st century can undo some of the legacies of the intervening century.