inlingua Brand Guidelines: A 1968 Swiss Network, Licensed Centres & Its Own Method

School owners, a shared name and a head office in Bern.

inlingua was founded in Switzerland in 1968, and its international organisation, inlingua International AG, is based in Bern. German Wikipedia describes the company as an umbrella for language centres that are legally independent and operate under a licence agreement. Besides looking after the brand, it says, inlingua International runs its own publishing house for teaching materials. The company writes its name in lower case throughout its own site, and this guide follows that spelling.

The origin story is one of cooperation rather than a single founder. In August 2016 The Nation, the Bangkok daily, quoted the managing director of inlingua Thailand as saying that inlingua International had been set up in Switzerland by like-minded school owners who pooled their resources to raise the quality of materials, teaching and professional standards in the language-school business. The same article said inlingua had opened its Bangkok branch in 1988 and by then had 20 branches across Thailand, most of them in Bangkok, with others in Hat Yai, Nakhon Ratchasima and Udon Thani. Its newest branch was in Salaya, and inlingua Thailand put the number of people studying at its Bangkok schools at more than 12,000, children and adults, with thousands more taught through its corporate training department.

The size of the network depends on the date and on who is counting. In 2016 The Nation reported the figure given by inlingua Thailand: more than 400 schools in more than 40 countries. German Wikipedia gives about 300 centres in 35 countries as of 2018, and its list of locations puts Germany, Italy and France ahead of other countries. In 2026 inlingua’s own site says it has more than 200 centres in more than 30 countries, and more than 50 years of experience.

Ten principles and a book series.

Every inlingua centre teaches to the inlingua Method, the company says, a communicative approach that it sets out as ten principles. The first is to use only the target language in the classroom from the start, so that learners think in the new language instead of translating. Others include keeping teacher talk short so that learners speak more, setting new language in realistic contexts, keeping error correction light and “flipping” the classroom, with preparation tasks, some of them AI-powered, done before a lesson. German Wikipedia summarises the same approach as immersion in the target language, with spoken fluency placed ahead of written accuracy, and says the teachers are native speakers. On its own site, inlingua describes the method as a form of direct teaching that presents vocabulary and grammar in conversation, through role-plays and real-life exchanges, and says each trainer completes training in the method before teaching it.

The materials are the brand’s other constant. inlingua says it writes its own course books, workbooks, audio, video, tests and e-books, organised by the levels of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). Its 2026 catalogue lists General English from A1 to C2, Business English and German from A1 to C1, and French, Spanish and Italian from A1 to B2, with children’s courses up to B1. The company says the materials are not sold on the open market: a school has to join the network to use them.

Around the books sits a set of digital products with short, lower-case names: my.inlingua, a virtual classroom called my.VC, my.lab and my.conversations, while inlingua plus combines classroom lessons with e-learning. Courses for children carry their own names, among them DOTS, Bubbles, Junior and Go World. The international site also offers a free online placement test in five languages, and it sorts its courses for adults, companies and children.

How language schools present themselves.

Language schools sell something that is hard to photograph: progress in a language. Their websites tend to show the setting instead. ELS, for example, describes its centres as sitting on American college campuses and points to shared lounges, cafeterias and computer labs, while inlingua’s international site sorts its courses for adults, companies and children and names the local centre, such as inlingua Berlin or inlingua Utah, beside each student quote.

Course and level names do much of the identity work. The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages offers a shared scale of six levels, from A1 to C2, and inlingua organises its own course books by those codes. Others number their own ladders: ELS teaches in 12 class levels and says more than 600 colleges recognise its level 109 or 112.

Much of the booking and some of the teaching happen online. Schools such as inlingua and ELS carry placement tests, application pages and branded learning platforms on their sites: inlingua runs a family of “my.” products for e-learning and virtual classrooms, and ELS offers a free online English test and a WhatsApp chat with admissions staff.

Owners, networks and accreditations appear on the schools’ corporate pages. inlingua licenses its name to independently owned centres, a franchise model the Swiss newspaper 20 Minuten described in 2024. ELS names its accreditation by ACCET, and since 2022 has belonged with ILSC and Berlitz to Language Education Holdings, The PIE News reported. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand, and marks clearly what rests on the company’s own word.

A licence system behind a shared name.

Behind the shared name is a licence system. In June 2024 the Swiss newspaper 20 Minuten explained that inlingua International runs a franchise model: licensees around the world pay a fee to use the teaching materials and the inlingua name, but trade independently of the head office. The same report said that the licensee running the schools in Bern and Thun had lost its inlingua licence that spring over unpaid licence fees, and that the schools had since traded under another name.

inlingua’s partner page sets out two current forms of licence. A Full License gives a centre exclusive brand rights in its area and access to all of the platforms and materials; a Target Group License serves a narrower group of clients with tailored content. The company says every licence includes onboarding, its digital teaching platforms and access to an ISO 21001 group certification.

In practice that system shows in how the brand reads. The international site uses one lower-case name across separately owned schools, and it repeats the same CEFR level codes, from A1 to C2, that learners meet in their books. Local centres such as inlingua Berlin, inlingua Utah and inlingua Léman appear under that single name in its testimonials, each with its city or region added after it.

For a design guide, inlingua shows how a licensed network can stay recognisable through a method, a book series and a name written the same way everywhere. Compare Berlitz, a language-school name that dates from 1878, and Wall Street English, another international English-teaching brand. For this guide we use a deep teal, a sky blue and a warm sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep inlingua’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.