Multilingual experience linked to delayed aging

https://fens2026.abstractserver.com/program/#/details/presentations/5474

by bookofjoe • 16 days ago

49 57 16 days ago

fens2026.abstractserver.com

One thing I've never seen discussed on this topic (possible I just missed it, I only read popular accounts) is whether speaking multiple languages is a proxy for higher sociability / stronger social ties. That's a known dimension that improves health and aging and I wonder if just being able or interested in speaking with a broader swath of people is what helps more than the cognitive demands of switching.

comrade1234• 16 days ago

Learning German hasn't made me more sociable.

westurner2• 16 days ago

But there was neurogenesis.

And, just thinking about other cultures

CalRobert• 16 days ago

sounds like you integrated well!

elpakal• 16 days ago

Raised multilingual here (as in father spoke one, mother spoke another, living abroad and US back and forth). I don't know about the stronger social ties but I have found that thinking in a different language helps me get to sleep easier. There are times when I'm spinning around in webs in English (work, life etc) at night, and when I switch over to Spanish thoughts I fall asleep easier.

Maybe just stuff like that is enough to make a difference.

HPsquared• 16 days ago

That's nice, like the brain switching to "home mode" maybe?

barrenko• 16 days ago

Learned some french recently, heavy bouts of insomnia due to moving / stress - I will try this advice exactly this night.

cyberax• 16 days ago

Switching into another language also helps if you are stuck in an environment where you do not want to pay attention (e.g. on a bus with blaring ads that you can't mute or with a rude neighbor yapping on their phone).

iLemming• 16 days ago

helps me get to sleep easier

I grew up speaking multiple languages. My monolingual friend once asked in which language I dream, and I said - "not sure, I think in all three different ones I'm currently fluent". "But how do you know?", he kept pressing. "Ah, well, they come with subtitles", I joked. But since then I often wonder, how do we recognize a language in our dreams?

markerz• 16 days ago

In my world, most multilingual speakers are children of immigrant families, and that transcends socio-economic boundaries. Plenty of immigrants were already wealthy before coming to the SF Bay Area, where we import highly educated, specialized workers. On the other hand, we also import physical laborers who are also generally multilingual but not in the same social class.

Some of these immigrants are very well supported with a strong social network, while others struggle with isolation.

paulsutter2• 16 days ago

On first reading I assumed you meant the physical laborers would have the stronger social network, and the wealthy would be more isolated (true in my experience). But you may have meant just the opposite!

In fact it's two separate questions because it can go both ways, heavily.

Interesting food for thought, thanks for posting.

timr• 16 days ago

One thing I've never seen discussed on this topic (possible I just missed it, I only read popular accounts) is whether speaking multiple languages is a proxy for higher sociability / stronger social ties.

Yes. This is exactly what you should be asking with this kind of stuff. The research is hopelessly confounded by social status traits that correlate with wealth.

And before anyone says it, the abstract claiming "adjustment for linguistic, physical, and sociopolitical exposome factors" is fine, but it's essentially impossible to control for something as pervasive as the effects of wealth, without randomization. There are also factors -- like the culture you grew up in -- that are equally difficult to control. For example, if your dataset has only X multi-lingual Americans, and 1000x multi-lingual Western Europeans, no amount of statistical massage will correct for the imbalance.

TFNA4• 16 days ago

Sadly, this beneficial activity doesn’t look promising in the longterm. Real-time interpretation of foreign languages through earbuds is already available in its nascent phase, and China at least has begun cutting foreign-language programmes at its unis because such AI translation is seen as the way of future. Once this tool becomes adopted enough societally, the learning of foreign languages is going to become a very niche hobby. It’s already becoming a niche hobby when many developed-country Gen Z are content with traveling and working abroad with only a knowledge of English alongside their native language.

asveikau6• 16 days ago

I think any multilingual person will be skeptical of your analysis. Translation is not a substitute for understanding the original. It's good that we have translations, but it isn't the same. As you get into consuming art, literature, poetry, commentary, this is relevant.

TFNA4• 16 days ago

Learning a foreign language in order to get more out of art, literature, or poetry is already a very niche hobby and one risks being accused of snobbism or privilege for suggesting it. Art, literature (of the kind where learning the original language could be important), and poetry themselves are niche hobbies.

Thraway1986• 16 days ago

The AI will be able to do all that for you. What you're touching on is the difference between comprehension vs merely being a vessel for information.

mcswell2• 16 days ago

1) But for many people and in many situations, translation---including MT---is good enough. And that overcomes any perceived need to learn another language (which learning may be in opposition to learning something else, something perceived as more important).

2) Most people don't "consume" literature or poetry, and it's unclear to me that non-performance art requires language. (I appreciate Rennaissance painting, but apart from the occasional Latin writing I don't need language to understand it.)

Disclaimer: Besides English, I'm reasonably fluent in Spanish (more so 35 years ago when I last lived in a Spanish speaking country), and used to be reasonably fluent in German, French, Tzeltal and Shuar (and a bit of Italian and written classical Greek). So I have every reason to hope this study is correct. But I have my doubts.

amunozo2• 16 days ago

This has been said for ages and, as a person in a very multilingual environment, I still cannot see it happening, no matter how good the translations are. I may be wrong, but talking through translation earbuds seems dystopic and uncomfortable.

yulker• 16 days ago

there's also no substitute for the reduced inferential distance when two people speak the same language. the literal meaning of words encodes just a subset of the communication

Thraway1986• 16 days ago

but for people in unilingual environments, this tech seems like a miracle

aiisjustanif• 16 days ago

Once this tool becomes adopted enough societally, the learning of foreign languages is going to become a very niche hobby.

That could a long time or it could be a very different implementation than the one you describe. Half of the world knowing 2 or more languages and that has been growing over time. I don’t see the evidence that technology will soon close the gap of speaking and understanding another language when in comes to communicating with family, music, business, participating in community events, volunteering, or even intimacy.

drtgh• 16 days ago

China at least has begun cutting foreign-language programs because such AI translation is seen as the way of future. Once this tool becomes adopted enough societally, the learning of foreign languages is going to become a very niche hobby.

If this happens, professional or reliable translations will only be accessible to those who can afford/pay them, leaving everyone else stuck with the errors produced by LLMs.

To use machine translation, one have to know the language to review the output; otherwise, you're doomed to mistakes. Whatever you do with LLMs, the same thing will happen.

I would name all the marketing surrounding the A"I" as the LLM's blindness virus, or something similar.

slim• 16 days ago

people learn by trial and error. ai output can be 50% accurate. it is still useful

Thraway1986• 16 days ago

Nah it'll be the same progression as llms.

feverzsj• 16 days ago

China does this, because significant amount of foreign companies have left or plan to leave China.

wibr• 16 days ago

Even if the translation is perfect and "real-time", it comes with a significant latency that will make any conversation less natural. Good for some situations while traveling, not something you would want to rely on for everyday life.

paulsutter2• 16 days ago

With AI there will always be people who learn more, faster using AI. And there will be people who use AI to avoid learning. When moving abroad, I hope folks will do the former (and the latter as tourists).

When I move back to Japan I'll wear something like Even Realities glasses, and when unknown vocabulary gets used, display that. Personally I think this will help me learn better than before. But let's wait and see!

I'm very hopeful about learning-acceleration tools. Just think what will be possible with Neuralink.

m0llusk• 16 days ago

That seems like saying weightlifting is pointless because we have robots for lifting and moving things around. But lifting weights can improve health and lifespan. It may also be that thinking in another language is different from merely translating because of the idioms and cultural norms and references involved.

supertrope• 16 days ago

Mass market GPS navigation devices haven't made learning how to navigate a city like a local obsolete. If you've ever seen a gig economy driver get lost despite having step by step instructions...

ChrisArchitect• 16 days ago

Dr Amoruso said: “In simple terms, people who spoke more languages tended to have brains that looked younger than expected for their chronological age. The effect was not only related to the number of languages spoken. Higher language proficiency and earlier acquisition of a second language were also associated with more delayed brain ageing. This suggests that multilingual experience matters as a gradient: it is not simply about being bilingual or not, but about the depth and duration of language experience.”

https://www.fens.org/news-activities/news/speaking-another-l...

Eisenstein• 16 days ago

Some peer criticism from: Vanhove, J. (2026). Does multilingualism really protect against accelerated ageing? Critical comments on Amoruso et al. (2025). Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 1–10.

"As the authors correctly point out in their discussion, their observational study does not allow them to establish any causal links between the degree of multilingualism in a country and the extent to which its inhabitants show signs of accelerated ageing. Unfortunately, they do not seem to have kept this insight in mind when they came up with the title (‘Multilingualism protects …’) and the abstract (‘These results underscore the protective role of multilingualism …’) that grabbed the media's attention."

"The authors use country-level data on multilingualism, namely the estimated percentage of monolinguals in the country (the Mono variable in BAG_OR_cross.csv), the estimated percentage of people in the country who know exactly one additional language (One), those who know exactly two additional languages (Two), and those who know at least three additional languages (Three), always at the time of data collection."

"According to a simple OLS regression model at the country level with the monolingualism percentage as its sole predictor, a 10-percentage-point difference in monolingualism is associated with a difference in the average GAP value of about 0.36 years (some 133 days; 95% CI: (58,207) days). If log-per-capita GDP is controlled for, a 10-percentage-point difference in monolingualism is associated with a difference in the average GAP value of about 0.29 years (some 105 days; 95% CI: (22,188) days)."

fusslo• 16 days ago

totally off topic. I noticed the banner photo ( https://fens2026.abstractserver.com/program/img/logo.e8cd4ff... ) load noticeably slow.

It's 1,790.16 KB (1,833,122 bytes), which is ~800,000 bytes larger than the code space of the main microprocessor of the product I'm working on.

inigyou3• 16 days ago

It is also known that programming languages are treated by your brain similarly to human languages. But it is not known whether this means make your brain younger.

Multilingual experience linked to delayed aging

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