AS THE ALZHEIMER’S COMMUNITY HERALDS BILINGUAL BRAINS AS MITIGATING DEMENTIA, SOME RESEARCHERS SUGGEST OTHERWISE.
Knowing another language is a lovely thing. It opens new worlds, helps you navigate them, and leads you, explorer-like, to new discoveries. You find words like zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, that are much catchier in another tongue. You uncover words for which no English equivalents exist — déjà vu, for instance, or schadenfreude, that guilty pleasure we take in someone else’s misfortune. Languages expand our humanity by allowing us to see the world as others see it. “To speak another language,” the Holy Roman emperor Charlemagne once observed, “is to have another soul.”
But does bilinguality do something for our bodies as well as our spirits? Could a second language help make our brains more resilient to the effects of aging?