used parallel to the community's dialect, such as in churches, and elementary and secondary schools; this meant that many Wisconsinites were trilingual, speaking their heritage dialect, Wisconsin High German and English. The extended multilingual contact over multiple generations of Wisconsin German heritage speakers, has resulted in the development of a language that not only contains features of their ancestral dialect, standard German and English, but also developed new linguistic features of its own. Language maintenance Schools For the early German settlers, German, not English, was the predominant language used in schools in rural Wisconsin (Petty). Teachers were hired from Germany, German textbooks were at first imported, then later printed in the US. By 1854, the Wisconsin State Law declared that all major subjects were to be taught in English (Petty); however the state had little authority over local schools, which were locally governed and financed (Petty). Schools fully switched to English by the early 20th century, which partially contributed to the gradual decline of German heritage speakers. Grammar Previously, researchers have looked at heritage languages to study incomplete acquisition or L1 attrition (Polinsky, 1995; Sorace 2004; Montreal 2008), yet speakers of Wisconsin German do not fit into either of those categories. Modern Wisconsin Heritage German speakers have grown up speaking German in the home, and often only learned English upon entering school, around the age of 6. This means that their German, including grammatical features such as dative, would have already been acquired, if it existed in the speakers' heritage language. Morphosyntax One difference between Wisconsin Heritage German and Standard German and its ancestral dialects are changes in its case marking system, such as the loss of the dative case. In Germany, there exists variation among its different dialects: for instance, in the Rhenish Hesse region, one can still find a three-case marking system (nominative, accusative, dative); in the Eifel, a two-case system; and in the Low German dialectal regions, a single case system. However, in Wisconsin German, while heritage speakers appear to no longer show use of the dative case, they have developed new morphosyntactic features. Across different dialects, heritage speakers have begun marking case in same or similar ways: in some cases, their Differential Object Marking (DOM) would align with Standard German morphology; in other cases, speakers appear to have restructured and reanalysed the DOM to create a new semantic-morphosyntactic system. For example, Yager et al. (2015) cite