This paper explores how Hemshin people living in the north-east of Turkey respond to the sociolinguistic and environmental transformations that have been taking place on Hemshin lands after long-lasting Turkish only language policies and more recent “development” projects such as hydropower plants, stone quarry, and major roads. As Hemshin landscape is transformed through the uncontrolled investment projects, Hemshin people have been mobilized around a unique grassroots movement. Through the analysis of written texts such as social media posts, news reports, and recordings of in-depth interviews that I conducted during the 21 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Istanbul, Rize, Artvin and highland pastures in Turkey between 2021 and 2022, I demonstrate how Hemshin people fashion their environmental opposition in unique and unexpected ways. In a context where the official line of the Turkish state promotes the ideology of ethnic, cultural, and linguistic homogeneity of the Turkish nation state and the specificity of Hemshin identity as a distinct ethnic identity has not been made explicit in the local or national public discourse, Hemshin people mark boundaries that distinguish them from outsiders as they employ their linguistic and cultural resources in their environmental opposition. Emerging from within the Hemshins’ strong “sense of place” (Feld and Basso 1996) and commemorations of “tasks of habitation” (Ingold 2002) in Hemshin landscape, Hemshin linguistic resources involving place narratives, and Armenian toponyms, and ethno-ecological words which are incomprehensible to outsiders not only perform a boundary-marking role and disrupts the monologism of Turkish language in Turkey, but also prompt negotiations and reaffirmation of cultural difference and what constitutes that difference among the Hemshins. In the process, relationships with both language and environment are mutually (re)created, maintained, and (re)negotiated. Drawing from the literature on multispecies ethnography that acknowledges the dynamics of life emerging within shifting and changing “assemblages” in the ruined landscapes of the Anthropocene (Kirksey 2015, Tsing 2015, Tsing et al. 2017) and linguistic anthropological work on language “survivance” attending to “vitalities of language” (Davis 2017, Perley 2011) as well as studies that complicate the view of languages as “systems” and “social practices” (Demuro and Gurney 2021, Pennycook 2021) I argue that instead of taking language and the environment as two distinct spheres of the political, we look at how these two are mobilized and constitute one another as parts of larger semiotic assemblages in people’s articulations of identity, survivance and claims over the environmental commons.