Speaking Languages
- mfulk78
- 7 hours ago
- 2 min read
Aging speed varies due to changeable lifestyle and environmental factors, and earlier studies suggested that speaking multiple languages might slow it down. However, those studies were weakened by crude health measures, tiny sample sizes, poor control for other influences, and a focus on sick patients making results inconsistent and hard to apply to healthy people.
In the journal Nature Aging we see a large study of 86,149 adults from 27 European countries. The researchers created a “biobehavioral age gap” score to measure whether someone is aging faster or slower than their calendar age. They used data on strengths (physical function, education, memory) and weaknesses (heart/metabolic disease, being female, hearing/vision loss), plus country-level data on how common multilingualism is.
Protective traits delayed aging; risk traits sped it up. Speaking multiple languages strongly shielded against accelerated aging cutting the risk by 30% over time while being monolingual raised risk by 43%. These links held even after accounting for language families, exercise, social ties, and political/economic factors.
Multilingualism consistently protects against premature aging across diverse healthy populations, supporting its promotion in global public-health efforts. I would be curious if this theory holds in the United States? The European Union by nature has more multilingualism due to diversely lingual country proximity. At the end of the day, it likely matters not as I think of this as playing an instrument or chess as we age. The benefit on aging more slowly is the constancy of new learning and synaptic generation/stabilization.
My Take Home: The constancy of new learning stabilizes neural networks delaying aging. Your choice to learn a new language, play an instrument consistently or challenge yourself with chess masters likely matters less than the choice inherent in doing so.
I STRONGLY encourage parents to have their children play an instrument and learn a language in the early educational years. I Absolutely encourage all 1st generation families to keep their primary language as the house language, saving English for school and friends.
Dr. M
