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Is being bilingual good for your brain?
Perhaps. Learning languages offers other, more concrete benefits
Economist (6/27/25)

Yes!  I won't mince words.  At least in my case, multilingualism has been very good for my brain.

In my rural Ohio high school, I took Latin and French, which is what were on offer.  I enjoyed both of them immensely, but they were almost strictly for reading and writing, so they didn't have much effect on the way my brain worked, at least not that I could discern.

In college, I added  Italian and German, both with reasonable spoken components, so my brain began to warm up.

Then I joined the Peace Corps and went to Nepal for two years.  My brain was on fire.  As I have described on Language Log (here), my group learned Nepali through total immersion and strictly on an oral-aural basis.  After three months of training in Missouri, I could already function in Nepali society without any difficulty.  When I got to my post (after a perilous trip trekking in), I had no one with whom to speak English, so I became essentially a native speaker of Nepali after one year in the country.  I had indeed opened up whole new areas of my brain.  That was really fun!  I even dreamed in Nepali.

After I came back from Nepal, I enrolled in a Sanskrit course, and that was all reading and writing, with literary appreciation a strong component.  At the same time, I took first-year Mandarin and loved it — the spoken part, that is, but had a strong aversion to learning characters.  I have repeatedly written about that dilemma in learning Mandarin on Language Log (see the refeferences below for some sample posts).  I also took Tibetan the same year; that was an eclectic "trip", because Tibetan was written in a  brahmic script,  had an archaic phonology reflected in its spelling, and had Sino-Tibetan roots.

More new rooms of my brain had been opened, but they weren't on fire the way they were in Nepal.

After a summer of Classical Chinese at Middlebury (you had to take a language pledge to attend, so my Mandarin language brain kept percolating).

Then off to London for Buddhist Studies and lots more Sanskrit, but no time for spoken language, which I yearned for.  So I went back to American and resumed my spoken Mandarin training.

A summer of simultaneous Hindi-Urdu (easy because of my knowledge of Nepali, which has a huge amount of imported Perso-Arabic vocabulary (same is true for Turkic Uyghur, which I learned by going to Eastern Central Asia starting in 1993).

I'll stop the language litany here, but it has never ended, though I will draw one personal conclusion before turning the rest of this post over to the Economist.  Namely, when I learn a language through listening and speaking, it always has a deeper, transformational impact than when I'm forced to learn it through writing.  The writing makes me feel that I am at a quintessential remove from the language itself.

Reams of papers have been published on the cognitive advantages of multilingualism. Beyond the conversational doors it can open, multilingualism is supposed to improve “executive function”, a loose concept that includes the ability to ignore distractions, plan complex tasks and update beliefs as new information arrives. Most striking, numerous studies have even shown that bilinguals undergo a later onset of dementia, perhaps of around four years, on average. But some of these studies have failed to replicate, leaving experts wondering whether the effect is real, and if so, what exactly it consists of.

…Ellen Bialystok of the York University in Canada, the godmother of the field [bilingualism and cognitive studies], has compared the cognitive protection bilingualism offers to that afforded by a slice of holey swiss cheese. Doing other things that are good for the brain, such as exercise, is akin to stacking the slices. Their holes occur in different places, and thus collectively offer greater cognitive protection. But all these studies take for granted the uncontroversial mental superpower that you get from language study: being able to talk to people you could not have otherwise. Even if you can’t pick your parents and be fluent from birth, that should be more than enough reason to give it a go.

"Holey swiss cheese" — nice metaphor!

Selected readings

• "Learn Nepali" (9/21/16)
• "How to learn to read and write Chinese" (8/13/13)
• "How to learn Mandarin" (7/17/18)
• "How not to learn Chinese" (4/16/17)
• "How to learn Chinese and Japanese" (2/17/14)
• "Excessive quadrisyllabicism" (2/17/18) — I was reminded of this post by this tweet from the author of the following famous article
• "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard" (8/27/91)
• "Learning languages is so much easier now" (8/18/17)
• "Beyond fluff" (3/19/17)
• "Aphantasia — absence of the mind's eye"
• "Sinological suffering" (3/31/17)
• "How to learn to read Chinese" (5/25/08)
• "Learning to read and write Chinese" (7/11/16)
• "The future of Chinese language learning is now" (4/5/14)
• "Paperless reading" (4/12/15)
• "Chinese without a teacher" (2/6/16)
• "Spelling mistakes in English and miswritten characters in Chinese" (12/18/12)

[Thanks to Philip Taylor]

June 30, 2025 @ 6:44 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Bilingualism, Language teaching and learning, Multilingualism

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