The following paper attempts to offer an initial sketch of a research issue which centers on the different ways in which the development of specialized forms of language knowledge in the context of the emergence of nation-state structures in Latin America’s 19th century contributes to outline efficient apparatuses which are capable of determining political and epistemological forms of the object they describe, i. e. language. Concern over property and use, so as over the forms of legitimate possession of language, manifests itself in the remarkable similarity that their tropes, figures and expressions show in relation to those appearing in the texts devoted to order and regulate the state. As shall be argued here, this similarity goes beyond mere coincidence. Andrés Bello’s can be seen as the paradigmatic case of the white Spanish-American Creole scholar playing a crucial role in both matters of language and law (he is the author of the two major works in Spanish for each branch, his Grammar of 1847 and the Chilean Civil Code of 1855), in relation to both tradition and literary history. Therefore, this paper is devoted to the analysis of these elements in a broad range of texts across Bello’s works, preceded by some general reflections on language and property and a contextualization concerning language-ideological debates on Spanish as a conflictive inheritance in the former Spanish colonies.