This article analyzes the decline of linguistics in rhetoric and composition PhD programs in terms of the "linguistic memory" (Trimbur) of composition. Since the field of linguistics once offered the primary means for composition to address the structural, psychological, sociohistorical, and cultural dimensions of language in student writing, the loss of linguistics courses and requirements in graduate curricula can be interpreted as a "forgetting" that language issues are, and always have been, central to writing teaching and research in linguistically diverse institutions. To help composition remember its commitments to language in light of the multiple languages and language varieties spoken and written in U.S. universities, as well as in the increasingly global contexts of writing pedagogy and scholarship, this article suggests that graduate programs reincorporate insights from linguistics and take other steps to foreground matters of language and language difference in their curricula.