How do voices come to be charged with regional, personal, tonal or generic significance in works of dialect literature? In asking this question, I follow Coupland (and the wider stylistic turn in sociolinguistics) in presupposing that the meaning of linguistic variation is something that speakers and writers must make happen; it does not happen by itself. Coupland’s work on ‘identity contextualisation processes’ (2007: 111–15) (or ICPs) offers one way of systematically answering this question, explaining for instance ‘how particular identities are made relevant or salient in discourse’, how speakers project personae onto themselves or others, and how they infuse linguistic variation with irony, sincerity or playfulness. Although Coupland’s account of ICPs is primarily concerned with spoken interaction, this chapter suggests that his framework might be extended to written texts, and to dialect literature in particular.