This paper reexamines Henry Sweet’s “living philology” within the broader context of late Victorian language sciences, approaching his work through the lens of the history of science. This paper argues that Sweet’s work exemplifies how language cannot be fully abstracted from its material supports, nor reduced to a purely physiological or physical phenomenon. The first section focuses on Sweet’s proposal of phonetics being the first requisite for studying the living philology. It examines the philologist’s attention to the synchronicity and the diachronic history of language. With the “living philology” explained, the second section dwells on Sweet’s insistence on the primacy of the observer. In this section, I contextualize Sweet’s techniques of observing in relation to the epistemic virtue of mechanical objectivity. Sweet’s negativism against using inscriptive instruments in phonetic experiments indicates an attempt to redefine objectivity. The third section launches an analysis of Sweet’s engagement with the technological condition of the production of linguistic knowledge. Although Sweet was explicitly critical of instrumental phonetics, his development of a universal phonetic transcription system nonetheless relied on print technologies, revealing a more ambivalent relationship to technological mediation than his rhetoric might suggest. The transformation of linguistic knowledge, it concludes, entails not only theoretical innovation but also the reconfiguration of representational systems, technological apparatuses, and their interrelations.