Abstract
A central theoretical issue in sociophonetics concerns the relationship between group-level and individual variation (Kendall et al., 2023; Walker and Meyerhoff, 2013). While variationist research has traditionally focused on socially defined speaker groups, more recent third-wave approaches place the individual at the forefront, viewing speakers as stylistic agents who use linguistic features in context as resources for identity construction (Eckert, 2012).