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The point of departure of this paper is the claim that dialectal variation should be approached not only as a geographical reflex but also, in line with recent discourse analytic approaches, as an interactional resource for various communicative objectives. Our analysis is based on 11 spontaneous conversational narratives produced by a Greek dialectophone from the island of Lesbos. We observe that she does not straightforwardly comply with the researcher's request to speak the (northern Greek) dialect. Rather, in order to produce dialectal features, she discursively constructs the spatio-temporal context of her village as it used to be half a century ago. It is mainly by animating, via direct speech, the voices of the foretime inhabitants of her village that she shows, rather than speaks, the local dialect. She achieves this by successfully adopting the discourse identity of performer, using devices like ellipsis, narrative present tense and prosodic differentiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]