Sacrebleu! Speaking more than one language may help slow down ageing, study finds

Speaking multiple languages has always been socially and culturally enriching, but a new study has uncovered another unexpected benefit: It could help us to live longer.

By analysing survey data from more than 80,000 people aged 51 to 90 from across 27 European countries, researchers examined whether the speed at which they aged was faster or slower than expected based on health and lifestyle factors.

The findings, published in the journal Nature, concluded that people who could speak only one language were more likely to experience accelerated ageing, which refers to a person's biological age being higher than their chronological age, putting them at higher risk of age-related diseases.

Meanwhile, multilingual Europeans were half as likely to experience accelerated ageing, on average.

The results were also dose-dependent, meaning that for every additional language spoken, people’s ageing was more delayed over time - in spite of any social, environmental, or political differences between them.

“Each additional language provided measurable protection,” Agustin Ibanez, the study's co-author and a neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin, told Euronews Health.

“It’s a strong signal that everyday mental activity, such as using multiple languages, can influence the biological pace of ageing,” he added.

While previous studies have linked bilingualism to slower ageing, they have used smaller groups of people and focused on cognitive decline. By using extensive population-level data, the new study provides a much broader view on how multilingualism can positively affect overall health and ageing, Ibanez noted.

“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,” he said.

Ibanez said this also has emotional benefits, shaping health and wellbeing through strengthening people’s social lives and sense of identity:

“Multilingualism also enhances social connectedness, cultural belonging, and perhaps emotional regulation. These experiences reduce stress and support cardiovascular, metabolic, and immune health. Therefore, the mechanism is likely multi-layered, involving biological, neural, cognitive, and social factors that work together to build resilience”.

Where in Europe is most multilingual?

Around 75 per cent of working-age adults in the European Union can speak more than one language, EU data shows.

While the Nordics tend to rank among the highestfor bilingualism, Southern Europe fares less well.

Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom foreign language learning has faced a steep decline in recent years. In 2024, only 2.97 per cent of A-levels, the main school qualification exams in the UK, were for modern foreign languages, according to a report from the Higher Education Policy Institute.

Ibanez hopes his study will encourage a greater uptake of multilingual education for people of all ages - not only for the potential health benefits, but also the social ones, particularly given loneliness and isolation are pervasive problems.

“In schools, encouraging early and sustained language exposure may build long-term cognitive and emotional resilience,” he said. “In adult education and community programmes, supporting bilingualism can foster inclusion, creativity, and well-being”.

From a public health viewpoint, language-learning could also become an important and cost-effective strategy for helping prevent certain age-related conditions.

“Health systems increasingly recognise that social and cultural factors influence ageing, and language should now be part of that conversation,” Ibanez said. “Our results suggest that language learning is both cultural and biomedical”.