Learning Another Language May Slow Brain Aging, Huge New Study Finds
A large international study suggests that being multilingual can slow down cognitive aging
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Speaking multiple languages could slow down brain ageing and help to prevent cognitive decline, a study of more than 80,000 people has found.
The work, published in Nature Aging on 10 November, suggests that people who are multilingual are half as likely to show signs of accelerated biological ageing as are those who speak just one language.
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“The effects of multilingualism on ageing have always been controversial, but I don’t think there has been a study of this scale before, which seems to demonstrate them quite decisively,” says Christos Pliatsikas, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Reading, UK. The paper’s results could “bring a step change to the field”, he adds.
The researchers used a computational approach to explore the link between multilingualism and healthy ageing in 86,000 healthy participants aged between 51 and 90 years across 27 European counties.
The researchers compared participants’ biobehavioural age gaps with the number of languages they spoke. This part of the data was based on self-reporting and therefore didn’t account for the level of language proficiency.
The researchers found that people who spoke only one language were twice as likely to have a high biobehavioural age gap than were those who spoke two or more languages. This effect increased with number of extra languages spoken. “Just one additional language reduces the risk of accelerated ageing. But when you speak two or three this effect was larger,” says Ibáñez.
Such a large study “really strengthens the interpretation that multilingualism, rather than other factors, protects us during ageing”, says Teubner-Rhodes. “It was using a really large, geographically diverse sample and that allowed them to control for a number of confounders that are typically present in multilingualism research, like immigrant status and wealth.” Future research should include more diverse populations outside Europe, she adds.
The researchers hope that their findings will influence policymakers to encourage language learning in education.
This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on November 10, 2025.
Katie Kavanagh writes for Nature.
First published in 1869, Nature is the world’s leading multidisciplinary science journal. Nature publishes the finest peer-reviewed research that drives ground-breaking discovery, and is read by thought-leaders and decision-makers around the world.
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