The aim of the paper is to describe the most important and dominating features of the academic language used in higher education institutions and university settings. Academic language greatly differs from the general or spoken language in terms of various language elements, namely on all the language levels. Academic language requires a precise formulation of facts; therefore, the most distinctive features of this professional use of language used in scientific discourse on the lexical level includes in particular the terminology and definitions, while terms are in this type of text closely connected with designata. On the syntactic level, a significant feature for the university setting is the objective character of the text, which is manifested by means of impersonal constructions used by the author of the text. In the German language, it is in particular the use of the passive voice and passive constructions, verb-nominal constructions, and that of perfective verb forms. On the stylistic level of the academic language, we can observe the tendency to strong formality, which results from the selection of stylistic means and forms.