Overview
- Published in Nature Aging, the analysis covered 86,149 adults from 27 European nations using an AI-derived biobehavioral aging clock.
- People in settings where at least one additional language is commonly spoken were 2.17 times less likely to show accelerated aging, while monolinguals were more than twice as likely.
- The relationship appeared in both cross-sectional snapshots and longitudinal follow-up, indicating reduced risk of accelerated aging over time.
- Protection scaled with language count, with each additional language associated with greater benefit.
- Authors propose language learning as a low-cost public-health strategy but emphasize the observational design, lack of proficiency/use measures, and need for longitudinal and interventional tests of causality.