Phonological Stylization and Social Meaning in Online Speech Performances

William Labov’s pioneering work on the social motivation of sound change reshaped our understanding of language variation within physical communities. Rather than extending Labovian models of sound change to digital contexts, this paper reconsiders how phonological features with established sociolinguistic histories are recontextualized within contemporary online speech performances. Drawing from a corpus of publicly available spoken performances sourced from TikTok, Reddit, and Instagram, the study identifies recurrent phonological features such as TH-stopping, r-deletion, vowel fronting, consonant cluster reduction, and innovative prosodic stylizations. Using sociophonetic analysis, the research explores how these features are selectively deployed as stylistic and indexical resources, functioning to signal stance, humor, relatability, and persona construction within platform-specific digital performances. Instead of treating these patterns as evidence of phonological change in progress, the findings demonstrate how online spaces facilitate the stylization, circulation, and re-enregisterment of familiar phonological forms, shaped by audience orientation, platform affordances, and heightened performativity. These results align with third-wave sociolinguistic approaches to style, indexicality, and enregisterment, highlighting how digital media environments serve as influential sites for the negotiation of social meaning through sound.