In everything we do, be it in offering our academic programmes and continuing education courses, conducting cutting-edge research or providing our services, we focus on generating new findings in the field linguistics and applying them in practice. Our team comprises approximately 300 employees, who call on their scientific expertise and extensive practical experience in performing their work. Based on internationally recognised research, they pass on practical, innovative knowledge and skills to our students, meaning they have all the tools they require to embark on and succeed in careers in the language and communication professions.
 
Students on our BA in Multilingual Communication, BA in Communication, BA in Language and Integration and MA in Applied Linguistics degree programmes graduate confident in the knowledge that they have received ideal training for working professionally with language and languages. The IAM Institute of Applied Media Studies, the ILC Institute of Language Competence and the IUED Institute of Translation and Interpreting all belong to the School of Applied Linguistics.

As part of our wide-ranging activities, we have also compiled Switzerland’s biggest quadrilingual text database of public discourse: the Swiss-AL corpus. Swiss-AL allows for large-scale analyses of language and discourse evolution across different periods of time and all of the country’s language regions. One of the more playful ways in which Swiss-AL is used sees a research team from the School preside over the choice of Switzerland’s Words of the Year in the country’s four national languages. These words embody key social developments that are reflected in language.

A list of the events at the School of Applied Linguistics can be found on the German-language website.