Speaking more languages is linked to slower functional aging. Digest
As populations age, scientists are searching for lifestyle factors that might help people stay functionally younger for longer, and multilingual language use has emerged as a promising candidate. In a new study, researchers examined whether living in countries where speaking more than one language is common is linked to slower aging.
The investigators analyzed 86,149 adults aged 51 to 90 from 27 European countries, all without a reported dementia diagnosis. They trained a statistical model to predict age from a mix of positive and adverse health indicators, then defined each person's biobehavioral age gap as the difference between predicted and actual age. These age gaps were linked to national statistics describing language use, and compared four kinds of language environments: mostly monolingual countries, those where residents commonly spoke one additional language, two additional languages, or three or more.
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The analysis linked language environment to distinctive patterns of biobehavioral aging:
- In cross-sectional data, living in strongly monolingual countries more than doubled the odds of being in the accelerated aging group. Living in multilingual environments was linked to roughly half the odds of accelerated aging.
- Longitudinal results showed the same trend. Monolingual environments raised the risk of faster aging by 43%, while multilingual environments lowered it by about 30%.
- The effect was graded: the more additional languages people spoke, the stronger the protection, a pattern that strengthens confidence in observational findings.
- Adjusting for factors like migration, inequality, air quality, and political conditions didn't change the overall pattern. But in some models, the benefit of speaking three or more languages disappeared in cross-sectional data, and the benefit of speaking one additional language disappeared in longitudinal data.
These findings fit with the idea of cognitive reserve, the brain's capacity to cope with age-related changes by relying on more efficient or flexible networks. Regularly managing more than one language repeatedly engages attention, executive function (the systems that manage goals and task switching), and memory, and this sustained mental effort may strengthen vulnerable circuits in the brain.
The work suggests that language policy could be considered alongside physical activity, cardiovascular health, and other modifiable factors in strategies for healthy aging. Future studies that track individual language histories and test whether multilingual experience also dampens age gaps in people with neurodegenerative diseases or in intervention trials will be essential to determine how best to translate these population-level findings into practical recommendations. In this clip, Dr. Andrew Huberman discusses the power of effort, dopamine's role in motivation, and the mindset needed for effective learning — principles that can also support learning new languages.