Speaking Two Languages Seems To Slows Aging, Speaking Three Or More Augments The Effect

Speaking Two Languages Seems To Slows Aging, Speaking Three Or More Augments The Effect

Speaking two or more languages is associated with a reduced risk of accelerated aging, according to data from more than 86,000 people across 27 European countries.

It’s yet another great reason to learn a new language, or bring up a child in a bilingual household.

Previous research has proposed that multilingualism can help maintain cognitive function, but evidence has been inconsistent owing to the use of small sample sizes, clinical cohorts, and indirect measures of ageing.

Now published in Nature Aging, Agustin Ibañez and colleagues at the Global Brain Health Institute (GBHI) in Trinity College, Dublin, present evidence that promoting multilingualism can support healthy aging strategies at a population level.

The team analyzed survey data from 86,149 participants aged 51–90 years across 27 European countries to estimate whether aging was faster or slower than expected based on health and lifestyle factors.

They found that people who use only one language were approximately twice as likely to experience accelerated aging, whereas multilingual individuals were on average about half as likely to do so. The authors also observed that speaking additional languages promoted delayed aging over time and found a dose-dependent effect of speaking multiple languages—in other words, the more languages one spoke, the slower they aged.

The data showed that the protective effect of multilingualism remained significant even when they adjusted for age, and for physical, social, and sociopolitical exposures.

“Unlike potentially expensive dietary, lifestyle or translational interventions, multilingual language use is not confined to those who can afford specific resources,” said Jason Rothman from Lancaster University in the UK, who wasn’t involved with the study.

These findings could inform educational and public health policies aimed at promoting cognitive resilience and functional ability in aging populations, the authors suggest.

“Multilingualism is the default state of the world, and emerges from necessity, community or opportunity,” Rothman points out. “It is embedded in daily life, and spreads across social, cultural, and economic boundaries. This makes it uniquely positioned as a low-cost, scalable lever for public health.”

“If multilingualism builds resilience against aging, then encouraging additional language learning in schools, protecting migrant and minoritized languages, and fostering and maintaining opportunities for multilingual usage across the lifespan could be as important as campaigns that promote physical activity, or smoking cessation,” he added.

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The authors noted that multilingualism itself can’t be defined as such, since it occurs in roughly two phases. The first is an intensive, effortful, (even arduous) task to learn the basics of a new language, which establishes new neuronal networks and pathways. The second, is the continuous employment and expansion of a new language according to habitual use, which requires a different form of mental exertion, and, Rothman adds, would therefore be expected to affect the brain differently.

Disentangling these stages may shed light on exactly what the neuro-protective effect of multilingualism is and how it’s developed. Research has shown that mentally-fatiguing and/or stimulating tasks are strongly associated with protection from neurodegenerative disease like dementia.

Is multilingualism’s benefit to brain aging entirely from the mental gymnastics routine of learning and mastering a new grammatical ruleset and vocabulary, or is the social component: learning new ways to express complex thoughts in language and enjoying social events with new people from different backgrounds what accounts for the reduced aging? Is it both, are they complimentary or separate in their benefits?

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GNN reported last year on a survey that found more Americans to be bilingual on average than the French, Italians, or English, despite some negative stereotypes about our country’s reliance on English.

The “America the Bilingual Project” has found that the EU average for number of bilingual citizens is 25% of a country’s population, while the US is 23%—a few percentage points higher than France and Britain, just 5% less than Germany, and double that of the Italians.