This study compares the proportional rate and use of High German, Low German, and English in three written sources from the East Frisian-American community: five sample issues of the Ostfriesen Zeitung (OZ), a corpus of 369 correspondence letters published in the OZ, and a diary written by a reader of the newspaper. The data shows that prolonged language maintenance may be found in multilingual written texts despite a (completed) shift in the spoken domain: although the East Frisian communities across the United States had shifted from High German to English as a language of religion by the late 1940s, High German is still maintained as the default language in all three data samples, while Low German serves as a language of communal belonging, humor, and emotion. English occurs only as single lexical items in the newspaper, while it is used more frequently in the diary, reflecting the author's writing preferences. Thus, the OZ provides evidence for the influence of institutions in defying verticalization processes that may lead to language shift.