This chapter examines the ways in which speech could become entangled with non-human orders of identity in medieval texts, at once as a theoretical concept and as a concrete effect of scribal mise en texte. The first part considers encyclopedic and literary works that imagined human speech as something other than the natural possession of humanity, situating this power within a complex coordination between the human, the bestial, and the divine. The second section uses these ideas at the margins of the medieval discourse on the rational-discursive faculty as a lens to interpret the effects of punctuation in medieval manuscripts containing works of beast literature, arguing that the right conditions came together in these codices for an analogous entanglement of human and non-human meanings to arise as a literal effect in the course of reading: The identities and utterances of speakers of different species could blur together on the page, highlighting ambiguities in the relationship between speech and species identity that were encoded into the composition of the works themselves.