Researchers presenting at the FENS Forum 2026 in Barcelona found that multilingual people have measurably younger-looking brains, building on a 2025 Nature Aging study by the same research group that analyzed 86,149 people across 27 European countries and found multilingual people were roughly half as likely to show signs of accelerated biological aging. For this new research, led by Dr Lucia Amoruso of the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language alongside senior researcher Dr Agustín Ibáñez of Trinity College Dublin and the Latin American Brain Health Institute, the team studied people from Spain’s Basque region who spoke between one and four languages, including combinations of Spanish, Basque, French, and English.

The researchers first built a “brain ageing clock” using magnetoencephalography and artificial intelligence on a group of 728 people to establish what normal brain connectivity looks like at different ages, then applied that clock to a second group of 144 people to estimate each person’s brain age relative to their actual age. Bilingual speakers showed brains around six years younger than expected, trilingual speakers about seven years younger, and those speaking four languages showed brains up to 13 years younger than their chronological age, consistent with Dr Amoruso’s earlier finding that the protective effect is cumulative, meaning the more languages someone speaks, the greater the protection against age-related decline.

Dr Amoruso emphasized that the effect depends not just on how many languages someone speaks, but also on proficiency and how early a second language was learned, describing multilingual experience as working more like a gradient than a simple on-off switch. The team controlled for age, sex, and education, though they caution other factors like lifestyle and social engagement could still play a role, and they next plan to study whether these brain benefits extend to people with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, with the full findings set to be presented as a poster on July 8, 2026, ahead of formal peer-reviewed publication.

EXCLUSIVE: A New Brain-Imaging Study Finds Speaking More Languages Makes Your Brain Look Up To 13 Years Younger, With Researchers Presenting The Findings At Europe’s Largest Neuroscience Conference 🧠