medicine
Speaking Two Languages Seems to Slow Aging, Three or More Augments the Effect
Data from 86,000 Europeans showed multilingual people were about half as likely to age faster — a free, accessible lever for healthy aging.
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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