What constitutes the historical experience of modernity in the domain of knowledge production? Is it possible to conceive Chinese modernity as independent of global modernity? Why is linguistic modernity understood to be a necessary condition of social modernity in China? With these questions in mind, this paper reviews the universal language movement in early modern Europe, discusses the historical and discursive continuities between it and China’s efforts to reform its language, and argues that the May Fourth language reform movement should be understood as the practice of a historical understanding of intellectual modernity that first emerged in Europe in the early modern period.