This Surprising Skill Might Slow Down Brain Aging, New Study Finds

If you've been thinking about brushing up on your high school French or are interested in learning a few more phrases in Italian, now is the time. A new study published in Nature Aging found that learning a second language, or being bilingual, can slow down brain aging.

By analyzing data from 86,149 individuals aged 51 to 90 across 27 European countries, researchers found that people who live in bilingual communities or speak more than one language age more slowly compared to those who only speak one language.

A team, led by Dr. Ludovica Amoruso, used data including key health, lifestyle, and social information to develop a "biobehavioral age gap," also referred to as "BAG," to estimate how old a person's body and behavior make them appear compared to their actual age.

A negative BAG score indicates that the individual was aging slowly, while a positive score indicates that they were aging faster than their chronological age. The researchers compared individuals from bilingual communities to individuals from monolingual communities and found a significant difference in the data.

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According to the study, individuals from monolingual communities were about twice as likely to show accelerated aging compared to individuals who spoke at least one additional language had roughly half the risk of accelerated aging.

“Each additional language provided measurable protection,” Agustin Ibanez, the study's co-author and a neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin, told Euronews. “It’s a strong signal that everyday mental activity, such as using multiple languages, can influence the biological pace of aging."

Previous studies have attributed bilingualism to slower aging; however, they used smaller sample sizes. Due to the large population size analyzed, this new study provides a stronger association with how multilingualism in communities promotes slower aging and overall health.

“Speaking several languages continuously exercises multiple systems. It forces you to manage attention, inhibit interference, and switch between linguistic rules, all of which strengthen the networks that tend to weaken with age,” Ibanez said.