Rethinking sociolinguistics beyond positivist anthropocentrism

The differences between van Oostendorp’s response and my article are methodological and theoretical. They concern divergent ways of analysing interspecies and intraspecies interaction. The tensions that emerge are productive and reveal the challenges involved in rethinking sociolinguistics beyond anthropocentric assumptions. Whereas the response emphasizes and proceeds from a positivist operationalisation perspective, my multispecies ethnographical article explicitly questions some of the assumptions that inform such a perspective. Because of this difference in framing, the article and the response operate in different registers: the response deploys criteria that eschew the theoretical and methodological intervention the article seeks to make. While van Oostendorp and I may disagree about which frameworks are best suited to understanding these capacities in nonhuman animals in this day and age, I argue we cannot judge one framework—a sociolinguistic ethnographic one—by using the standards of another, namely a positivist framework.