The Anthropocene (alternatively, Capitalocene or Chthulucene, see Latour 2018 and Haraway 2016) is increasingly used to describe the era in which we live. The name captures how human thoughts and actions are having a major impact on Earth as a living planet. As a result, we face unprecedented losses in biodiversity, damage from climate change and increased human exploitation of nonhumans (Pennycook 2018:3). Humans and human actions are like “a major geological force” (Chakrabarty 2012) that not only changes the earth but is setting off irreversible climate change, eliminates biodiversity, and is leading to mass extinction. The planetary crisis can be traced to structural power relations that are enhanced by how Eurocentric views silence both other humans and nonhumans. The effect is worsened by treating the latter as inarticulate beings whose presence is merely material or natural. On these grounds, they are often shamelessly exploited (Deumert & Storch 2020; Sousa & Rocha Pessoa 2019). In the context of a planetary crisis, we should not ignore the voices of nonhuman animals (once more) and, especially so, those of animals whose lives are central to discussion of sustainability (Barron et al. 2020:13).

This talk makes a case for an animal turn in postcolonial (socio)linguistics (Cornips 2019) as a way of critically engaging with language ideologies towards animal speakers, and how they create unequal relations of power. I will consider how ‘language’ occurs embedded within  interactional multimodal exchanges (Levinson et al 2014). Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in various industrial dairy farms since mid-2018, this lecture will show that a dairy cow is a linguistic actor, who (i) opens the interaction with a human in ‘her’ barn (Cornips 2022), (ii) understands gaze withdrawal as turn-taking (Cornips & van Koppen 2024), (iii) becomes aware that the present humans understand her interaction, and alert to this, vary her recurrent vocalizations (Cornips in press), (iv) opens an interaction with the farmer but comes to know that he doesn’t gather the meaning of her multimodal interaction, and as a result, starts to articulate in a more pronounced way. 

Taken together, the lecture demonstrates that dairy cows as semiotically capable co-beings (Cornips & van den Hengel 2021) may lead to a new interspecies ethics, i.e. in “respectfully engaging in new rituals with them [that] can function as a gateway to further political interaction and extended conversations” (Meijer 2017).Thus, “[p]erhaps, the most important question is not what kind of knowledge we can produce in the ‘animal turn’ [in (socio)linguistics], but what we do with this knowledge – that is; how we put it to work, and for whose benefit.” (Pedersen 2014: 16).