In this article we examine the allomorphic variation found in Pennsylvania Dutch plurality. In spite of over 250 years of variable contact with English, Pennsylvania Dutch plural allomorphy has remained largely distinct from English, except for a number of loan words and borrowings from English. Adopting a One Feature-One Head (OFOH) Architecture that interprets licit syntactic objects as spans, we argue that plurality is distributed across different root-types, resulting in stored lexical-trees (L-spans) in the bilingual mental lexicon. We expand the traditional feature inventory to be ‘mixed,’ consisting of both semantically-grounded features as well as ‘pure’ morphological features. A key claim of our analysis is that the s-exponent in Pennsylvania Dutch shares a syntactic representation for native and English-origin roots, although it is distinct from a ‘monolingual’ English representation. Finally, we highlight how our treatment of plurality in Pennsylvania Dutch, and allomorphic variation more generally, makes predictions about the nature of bilingual morphosyntactic representations.

Some language communities continue identifying with their heritage language even after a shift to the majority language has occurred. In this paper I use a comparative approach to investigate the extent to which this postvernacular phase can be found among the broad spectrum of Pennsylvania Dutch-affiliated groups in North America. The results of a sociolinguistic survey presented here reveal that vastly different relationships to and experiences with the language and its affiliated cultures exist under the Pennsylvania Dutch umbrella. The postvernacular framework effectively describes the status of the language among the non-sectarians. However, with some exceptions, it cannot account for the extremely diverse scenarios existing among the sectarians (i.e., separatists). A better understanding of each of the relevant linguistic and cultural aspects at play here will have cross-linguistic implications for how languages are bound to human identities.