Der s-Plural im Alemannischen.

It is commonly agreed that the plural -s has become a part of Standard German inflection, yet in dialects such as Alemannic it is often seen as an intruder. We challenge this view based on data from a written survey amongst speakers of Swiss German dialects. Our analysis of pluralised loanwords (e. g. Mango) and abbreviations (e. g. WG ‘flat share’) shows a strong effect of both speakers’ age and grammatical gender that points towards a progressive integration of the plural -s into the dialectal system.
 While masculine and neuter nouns can express number syntagmatically (using articles that differ in singular and plural), feminine nouns rely heavily on suffixes (as the definite articl…