Why is it not written in French? Or Italian? Or Romansh? Because Switzerland has four official languages and English makes it easier for everyone
replyNot really. It's because the target audience is more academic/scientific rather than the Swiss population at large. In the latter case, it would be in the local languages. The law is relatively clear for this. English is not accepted in Switzerland as a replacement language for the "local" ones, although many people can speak or at least understand some English.
replyheavy sigh I'm Swiss. I know. What I meant to say is that German is not the default language in Switzerland.
replyMost researchers in Switzerland are non-Swiss, and many institutes have English as language of business
replyStaff nationality of Swiss higher education institutions:
reply- Universities: 55% Swiss, 45% foreign - Universities of applied sciences: 75% Swiss, 25% foreign - Universities of teacher education: 87% Swiss, 13% foreign - Professors: 49% Swiss, 51% foreign - PhDs/scientific collaborators: 30% Swiss, 70% foreign - Professors of ETH Zurich: 31% Swiss, 69% foreign
Why it has to be german?
replyWhat if I told you there’s this thing in 2026 called an LLM that can translate between any two languages with high fidelity for free, and you just clicked a single button in your browser to use it
replyIt's a university in a French speaking region for one.
replyNot quite: it's a collab between both ETHZ (Zürich, German speaking) and EPFL (Lausanne, French speaking). According to the website, the actual hardware is distributed all over the country (including in the Italian part).
replydeleted
replyenglish is the lingua franca
replybecause the brits won the language wars.
replyAnd the other wars ;)
replyBecause german is hard.
reply