Leonie Cornips (Nl-Lab, Humanities cluster Amsterdam & Maastricht University)

The animal turn in sociolinguistics: about the interspecies and intraspecies greeting by the dairy cow

This lecture will focus on how the dairy cow within the power dynamics of industrial farming, makes social meaning in her barn by relating to other cows and entering human(s). I will argue for an animal turn in sociolinguistics in order to provide an opportunity to develop a relational framework focusing on language as local meaning-making which is not human-centred, not language-centred, not praxis-centred. Instead, language is  distributed among and between species, materiality, place and time. Hopefully, the lecture will show that decentring the human in (socio)linguistic research brings to light novel research findings which transcend species hierarchies. Basing my observations on ethnographic research in various industrial farms in the Netherlands, I analyse the dairy cow as a linguistic actor who opens the interaction with the cow and human newcomer by producing a routinized ‘mmmm’ - not as ‘noise’ - but as the first pair part in a greeting exchange (Cornips, forthcoming). Power dynamics in the industrial dairy farming context dictate that the human, in contrast to the cow, does not produce the expected second pair part of the greeting exchange vocally, revealing at the same time that the dairy cow is not worth recognizing. Profound power inequalities also prevent the captive dairy cow from traversing space for establishing body contact with the (familiar) human newcomer, which counts as a fundamental aspect in a greeting exchange. Finally, not all individual cows greet vocally which might be related to the different personalities dairy cows have, and that the vocal greeting by the dairy cow is curtailed by the type of barn and by the number of various different humans who enter her barn.

This finding is important since learning and acknowledging greeting rituals of dairy cows may lead to a new interspecies ethics, i.e. in ‘respectfully engaging in new rituals with them can function as a gateway to further political interaction and extended conversations’ (Meijer 2013).
 
Cornips, Leonie & Louis van den Hengel (2021, 1 March). Place-making by cows in an intensive dairy farm: A sociolinguistic approach to nonhuman animal agency. Animals in Our Midst: the challenges of co-existing with animals in the Anthropocene, ed. By Bernice Bovenkerk and Jozef Keulartz, Springer.

Cornips, Leonie. The animal turn in postcolonial (socio)linguistics: the interspecies greeting of the dairy cow. Journal of Postcolonial Linguistics. Forthcoming

Meijer, Eva. 2013 Political Communication with Animals. In: Humanimalia. A journal of human/animal interface studies 5 (1) fall 2013

Contact Caroline Merkel (caroline.merkel@tyska.su.se) for the Zoom link!