David Clement Scott’s African apprenticeship was nowhere more apparent than in his approach to the vernacular language. It was the most immediate source of Scott’s evolving thought on race relations. His translations of the Scriptures and his magisterial dictionary of the Chimang’anja language were at the core of his linguistic and philosophical work. In nineteenth-century Malawi, spatial mobility and political turbulence were matched by an assemblage of mutually intelligible language forms. Out of them would the names Chimang’anja, Chinyanja and Chichewa get codified as ‘languages’ in the twentieth century. Scott was not, however, detained by the concerns over choosing between one variant or another that would eventually spark debate. The vernacular was, for Scott, on a par with the biblical languages and could make its own contribution to the understanding of the Scriptures. For example, Scott’s translations of the idioms of slavery and friendship in the Hebrew Bible drew on the importance of these idioms in the turbulent conditions of nineteenth-century Malawi.