Heritage conservation

Das Baudenkmal has two plurals, and neither is a mistake. Die Baudenkmäler, with the umlaut and -er, is what most people say and what a newspaper prints. Die Baudenkmale, with a plain -e, is what a heritage officer tends to write, and it is the form many of the state heritage laws use: the act in Baden-Württemberg is called the Gesetz zum Schutz der Kulturdenkmale. The doublet goes back to das Mal in its old sense of a mark or memorial, which allows both endings. It carries through every case, so the dative plural is either den Denkmälern or den Denkmalen. The choice is one of register rather than meaning: the -er form sounds like the street, the -e form like the office. Pick one and keep to it within a text, because a report that switches between the two reads as if two people had written it.