Speaking more than one language fluently doesn’t just feel like it deeply changes the brain, it does actually affect the way a person processes information, how ‘agile’ the brain remains throughout life, and it might even improve its resilience following severe illness. Several studies now suggest that bilingualism or multilingualism can help keep the brain young, and here is the evidence.
Learning more than one language doesn’t just feel good, it also brings a wealth of benefits. There are the obvious ones, like being able to communicate effectively as you travel, and enriching your inner life by accessing books, films, and other materials in the languages in which they were originally written.
Speaking more than one language fluently, however, also reshapes the brain in surprising ways. Studies are increasingly finding that bilingual people, who have native command of two languages, or multilinguals, who are able to speak more than two languages, are able to maintain their brains younger and healthier for longer, and that’s no coincidence.
In the process of learning new languages, and recalling words and grammatical structures from different language sets, our brain are constantly being “exercised” and forming fresh connections.
This leads not just to a kind of constant “rejuvenation” of brain cell networks, but also to improved resilience even when the brain is “challenged” by exposure to viruses and disease. Here is what the latest research has found.
Firstly, how does the human brain recall different languages? That is what two scientists from New York University set out to find in 2025, conducting a study whose findings they later published in JNeurosci.
Xuanyi Jessica Chen, a doctoral researcher in psychology, and Esti Blanco-Elorrieta, PhD, an assistant professor of psychology and neural science worked with 23 Spanish–English bilingual speakers (17 females, five males, one nonbinary participant), aged 18–45 years, to investigate where languages spoken with equal proficiency “reside” in the brain, and how bilinguals retrieve them.
“One of the remarkable things about bilinguals is that they can switch between languages that often use very different words and sounds,” said Blanco-Elorrieta, speaking to Medical News Today.
“We wanted to understand whether the brain uses separate mechanisms for each language or whether it can reuse the same underlying machinery across languages,” they explained.
Chen and Blanco-Elorrieta used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to track the brain activity of study participants in minute detail while they engaged in translation exercises between the two languages.
Then, they looked at what happened in participants’ brains when they worked with cognates, similar words with similar meanings across the two languages, and “pseudowords,” made-up words that followed syntactic and syllable structures common in both Spanish and English.
What the researchers found was that the brain appears to have “a language-general computational mechanism,” meaning that there is a single “engine,” or language headquarters, extracting meaning across different languages.
“We found that when bilinguals adjusted words to fit a grammatical context, for example, changing a singular noun into a plural noun, the same pattern of brain activity appeared across both English and Spanish,” Blanco-Elorrieta told MNT.
“This suggests that, rather than building separate systems for each language, the brain may rely on a shared neural mechanism for carrying out similar grammatical operations across languages,” they explained.
The most fascinating takeaway, perhaps, is that this shows how flexible and agile the human brain can be, as it readapts and restructures existing systems in order to “flex” as many language muscles as necessary; that is, it is economical, efficient, and has potential for endless adaptability.
Blanco-Elorrieta told us as much:
“Our results suggest that the brain can reuse the same neural machinery to perform the same grammatical computation across languages, even when the words themselves are different. More broadly, this may reflect a general principle of brain organization: Whenever possible, the brain may build flexible neural systems that can be reused across different contexts rather than creating entirely separate mechanisms for each task.”
While Chen and Blanco-Elorrieta’s study did not look at the implications for cognitive training and abilities, other researchers have turned their attention to the ways in which bilingualism may help keep the brain young.
Also in 2025, an international team of researchers led by Lucia Amoruso, PhD, Deputy Scientific Director and Group Leader at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL) in San Sebastian, Spain conducted cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of data from participants across 27 countries in Europe, looking at the relationship between multilingualism and biological aging.
The study, which included a total of 86,149 participants, used the biobehavioral aging clock framework to gauge whether being able to speak more than one language could, in some way, help keep people younger for longer.
The findings — featured in Nature Aging in November 2025 — indicated that, in countries where a large part of the population was able to speak more than one language, people were 2.17 times less likely to experience accelerated aging.
At the same time, monolinguals were more than twice as likely to experience early aging.
“Our results provide strong evidence that multilingualism functions as a protective factor for healthy aging. Language learning and use engage core brain networks related to attention, memory, and executive control — as well as social interaction — mechanisms that may reinforce resilience throughout life,” senior author Agustín Ibáñez, PhD, a professor of Global Brain Health at Trinity College Dublin, in Ireland, said in a press release.
One of the more striking findings of the study was that the effect appeared to be cumulative — that is, the more languages a person mastered, the slower they appeared to age.
“The protective effect was cumulative—the more languages people spoke, the greater their protection against aging-related decline,” Amorouso commented in the press release.
They presented a follow-up analysis conducted on data collected from a smaller subset of participants to the initial study. They looked for associations between a person’s ability to speak multiple languages and brain aging.
Once again, they identified positive results: The more languages a person was able to speak, the lower the difference between their brain age, and their biological age. That is, multilinguals’ brains stayed younger for longer.
“In simple terms, people who spoke more languages tended to have brains that looked younger than expected for their chronological age,” explained Amorouso in a press release.
“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 aging,” she went on to add.
Commenting on the study findings, Christina Dalla, PhD, professor or pharmacology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, and chair of the FENS Forum communication committee, who was not involved in this research, noted in the press release:
“This study suggests that learning a second, third or fourth language could help our brains to stay younger for longer, and the earlier we start, the better. There are many good reasons for learning another language at any age — social, cultural and for the health of your brain — so we should support language learning at school and throughout life, even if it’s hard.”
Bilingualism may even help protect the brain from cognitive damage following serious illness, according to evidence from a study conducted by John G. Grundy, PhD, co-founder and executive director of the Experience-Related Neuroplasticity (ERN) Institute in Toronto, ON, Canada, and Melanie Pujols-Beltran, from Binghamton University in New York.
This study — whose findings appeared in PNAS in June 2026 — looked at how bilingualism might influence executive function, including processes such as working memory.
To do so, the researchers who conducted it took the example of individuals who had experienced COVID-19, severe cases of which have caused long-lasting cognitive impairment. Grundy and Pujols-Beltran asked a deceptively simple question: Were bilingual people who experienced COVID-19 less likely to risk cognitive impairment in the aftermath?
The researchers analyzed data from 312 participants aged 18–80 years — of whom 84 were aged 18 to 29, 124 aged 30 to 59, and 104 aged 60 and over — who were self-reportedly spoke two languages.
“In this study, we asked whether bilingual experience might help explain why some older adults showed better cognitive resilience after COVID-19 than others,” Grundy told MNT.
“We focused on executive functions, which are the mental abilities that help people manage attention, switch between tasks, hold information in mind, and respond flexibly when circumstances change,” he explained.
The researchers reached a heartening conclusion: Older adults who were fluent in two languages fared better, from a cognitive point of view, after COVID-19, than those who had lower fluency across languages.
“In particular,” said Grundy, “earlier and richer bilingual experience was associated with greater resilience on tasks that require flexible control of attention. Put simply, older adults with stronger bilingual experience showed less evidence of executive-function disruption after COVID-19 than those with less bilingual experience.”
However, he cautioned that this does not suggest that bilingualism is a cure-all, or a fail-proof method of keeping cognitive decline at bay. “Rather, [the] findings suggest that bilingual experience may be one contributor to cognitive resilience” out of many, he told us.
Grundy hypothesized that:
“Managing more than one language over many years may repeatedly exercise the systems that help the brain select relevant information, manage competing demands, and adapt attention to changing contexts. Over time, that kind of experience may help the brain maintain function when challenged by illness, aging, or other sources of cognitive stress.”
Grundy and Pujols-Beltran’s study did not delve into the underlying biological mechanisms that might explain the link between bilingualism and a resilient brain. Still, Grundy ventured to surmise that “bilingualism may remodel the brain through repeated, context-dependent demands on attention and control.”
“Managing more than one language requires the brain to select the appropriate language, regulate competition from the other language, monitor context, and adjust behavior depending on the speaker, setting, and communicative goal,” he explained. “Over time, those demands may remodel the systems that support executive function.”
“The mechanism I find most plausible is not a single ‘bilingualism area’ of the brain,” he told us. Rather, he hypothesized, “it is a dynamic, experience-dependent remodeling of distributed control networks: stronger communication among regions, more efficient allocation of control, and better context-sensitive shifting between effortful and more automatic processing.”
For Grundy, what matters, based on the findings of this research, is not just how many languages a person speaks but also how and how often they use them.
“The relevant factor may not be the number of languages alone, but how those languages are used,” he suggested. “For example, someone who actively uses two languages every day across different contexts may experience stronger cognitive demands than someone who knows several languages but rarely uses them. Age of acquisition, proficiency, frequency of use, switching between languages, and social context may all matter.”
To conclude, it may all be about “flexing those mental muscles” as often as possible by frequently exposing them to the challenge of decoding different languages. According to Grundy:
“The more important question is probably not simply ‘How many languages does someone know?’ but rather ‘How deeply, flexibly, and regularly are those languages integrated into everyday life?’ If additional languages increase the need for flexible selection, context monitoring, and adaptive control, then they may contribute to the same kind of experience-dependent brain remodeling that we think may support resilience.”
