German linguistics, literature of the modern period, and German medieval studies are the subfields of German Philology at the University of Basel. Here, the reorientation of the humanities around cultural studies provides the background for connecting historical and philological skills with current, innovative impulses, such as postcolonial studies, discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics, sociolinguistics, and theories of communication. The result is a wide-ranging and unique spectrum of theories and topics, with texts and other forms of language situated in the cultural process, as well as linguistic, pictorial, and acoustic media in their specific contexts. This overall approach also brings to light the relationships between literatures, colloquial speech, technical language, economics, ecology, psychology, gender, and other fields of knowledge.

The field of German philology at the University of Basel includes the entire range of the field from both historical and systematic perspectives. With our curriculum, students cover all the eras, theories, and methodologies of the field, with a special emphasis on themes and approaches that are closely related to research in the department. Overall, our German program in Basel, with its historical study of culture, connects linguistics and literature and opens up a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives. The program's well-known interphilological perspective encourages both comparative and theoretical approaches.

German linguistics in Basel focuses on dialects and varieties, on the linguistic organization of texts and conversations, on the linguistics of language in the media, on the use of language (pragmatics), and on the mental dimensions of language and its acquisition (cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics), as well as on the relationship between language and social identity (sociolinguistics).

In Basel, the study of German-language literature in the modern period is characterized by a strong research foundation in narratology, rhetoric, aesthetics, literary theory, textual criticism, post-colonial studies, and intermedial studies (literature and music; literature and images). But along with such specializations, the program also includes teaching and research on canonical texts as literary artifacts, with the most important themes being contemporary literature, the aesthetic avant-gardes of literary Modernism, the modernization processes of the nineteenth century (from the Vormärz era up to realism and the fin de siècle), and the literature of the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Age of Goethe.

The focus of research in medieval studies in Basel is the epic and lyric texts of courtly literature in the twelfth and thirteen centuries, including Walther von der Vogelweide, Gottfried von Strassburg, and Wolfram von Eschenbach. For the later Middle Ages and the sixteenth century, our focus is on Lieder, prose novels, and comic literature, as well on Latin and Germanophone literature of Humanism in the Upper Rhine region and its broader European significance.

With a focus on research, students at the Master level extend their knowledge in all three subfields and set their own priorities about what material to focus on.