Speaking multiple languages may promote healthy aging
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- Reviewed by Robert H. Shmerling, MD, Senior Faculty Editor, Harvard Health Publishing; Editorial Advisory Board Member, Harvard Health Publishing
If you’ve ever thought about learning a second — or subsequent — language, consider that doing so might promote healthy aging, according to an analysis published in the November 2025 issue of Nature Aging.
Using data gathered from national surveys of 86,149 adults ages 51 to 90 (average age 67) in 27 European countries, researchers created a metric called a “biobehavioral age gap,” which compared participants’ biological ages (based on health, lifestyle, and socioeconomic information) with their chronological ages. If a participant’s biological age was higher than their actual age, researchers called that “accelerated aging.” They contrasted that data with how many languages participants in each country tended to speak, using computational methods to assess the relationship between multilingualism and biobehavioral age gap.
Participants living in places with higher multilingualism were half as likely to show signs of accelerated biological aging as those in locations where most people spoke just one language. The more languages residents of a given area spoke, the stronger the apparent protective effect.
While the study couldn’t prove that speaking multiple languages directly leads to slower biological aging, the results reinforced prior research suggesting that doing so might prevent accelerated aging and even improve cognitive function, including memory and attention, the study authors said.
Image: © Richard Drury/Getty Images
About the Author
Maureen Salamon, Executive Editor, Harvard Women's Health Watch
About the Reviewer
Robert H. Shmerling, MD, Senior Faculty Editor, Harvard Health Publishing; Editorial Advisory Board Member, Harvard Health Publishing
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