You live in one of the Cantons of Basel, where official language simply is German. If you however have to deal with civil aviation, then the legal language in many many ways, even including BAZL, is English.

After the SWISS civil war, yes.

The US civil are was 1861-4, AFTER the Swiss constitution of 1848 (ok, it was revised in 1866 and 1874, but that's revision)!

Tom

Abraham Lincoln wished you were right---our civil war ended in 1865. Also, as a result of the Civil War three important ammendments to the U.S. Constitution were adopted, so our constitution was revised as well.

The difference is that the Swiss constitution was revised as a whole (reformulated, rewritten, adapted etc.) in 1874 and 1999 and not (simply) amended. Thus, it has changed considerably since the first version and directly (sometimes) reflects modern times.

A good example is the division of power (does the federal state have the power to legislate on this or that?):

In the US, the federal legislative competence very often derives from "general-abstract" norms.

In Switzerland (in most of the cases) the federal competence to legislate regarding matter X or Y is clearly stated in the constitution.

Example: In the US, the "individual mandate" (forcing people to buy health care) in the new health care law is based (a heavily challenged viewpoint) on the commerce clause which grants Congress the "power to regulate commerce among the states".

In Switzerland, art. 117 of the constitution directly states the following:

Art. 117 Health and accident insurance 1 The Confederation shall legislate on health and accident insurance.
2 It may declare health and the accident insurance to be compulsory, either in general terms or for individual sections of the population.

As far as the legal language of civil aviation, I am assuming that English is used mostly for air traffic control and communication between airports. If Mimi is going to the airport most of the people in the airport itself should speak French and German. (The airport that services Basel is in France, right?)

And at the Basel airport, most people you encounter that work there also speak English, particularly at the check-in desks and in duty free. It is the default foreign language for people who don't speak French or German.

One exception I've heard about is this airport in the Flanders region of Belgium where officials are required to speak to everybody in Dutch---even if they understand you in your native language. (I'll try to post a reference later.)

That's one thing which Switzerland has managed to get right. Not every German-speaking Swiss can speak French or Italian, nor can every French or Italian speaking Swiss speak German, but enough know the other languages (or are willing to learn English as a lingua franca) to get along. More importantly, Swiss accept countrymen who do not speak their native language (yet) AS their countrymen. That's why Switzerland isn't Belgium.

You assume wrongly as English by the BAZL is used for fields like the registering of aircraft, the air cargo security program. Communication with German airports however is conducted in German. English also is THE language for the regulations for maintenance and for flight operations. The ATC in Switzerland in fact is supervised by BAZL but conducted by Skyguide, a state-owned but privately incorporated company, generally conducting business in English.

Basel-Mulhouse is officially German-French speaking 50/50 but here again, both the BAZL and the DGAC do most of their work in English. Basel-Mulhouse in regard to customs laws is 50% Swiss, 50% French. Traffic is conducted some 50% by the Swiss side, 40% by the French side, and 10% by the German side. Therefore the name Basel-Mulhouse-Freiburg.

yes, it is quite racist actually