English as a lingua franca has snuck itself into our daily lives, thus also affecting the language practices in many workplaces all over Switzerland. In the world of music, there are plenty of anglicisms that we use on a regular basis: DJ, Hip Hop, Rap, Charts, R’n’B and Jazz, among many others. This study aims […]

  As part of our English project, we decided to visit two museums in Basel and compare the English usage in those localities. The museums we visited were the Kunstmuseum and the Antikenmuseum. During our investigation we found that, despite both museums having a lot of international customers, not many signs were available in English. […]

Small. This adjective certainly applies to Basel. Dense. This one, without doubt, does too. This density shows in the plethora of different museums all around the city. One of the (one might add here internationally) more renown ones is the Kunstmuseum in the heart of the city. Another one, much less known (one might add […]

REMEMBER KARAJAN? Every orchestra musician knows at least one example of a true ‘old school’ conductor. One doesn’t necessarily have to go back as far as Herbert von Karajan and his Berlin Philharmonic to find pretty archaic relationships between conductors and orchestras. But how do conductors establish their leading position amongst a group of up […]

Museums play an important role for tourism in Basel. Thus, it is no surprise that museums use English  as an international language to reach and communicate with more tourists than could be achieved by Swiss German or even standard German. To reach younger international museum goers, instagram has become the medium of choice, but creating […]