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Second Languages and Health

Welcome to the 5-Week Linguist Show. Over the next five weeks, I’m going to share with you 50 different lessons that I’ve learned about language teaching and learning as I approach my 50th birthday. It’s hard to believe I’ve been teaching languages for more than half of my life. That’s pretty astounding, and obviously for my entire life, I’ve been learning.

So I wanted to cover a different theme each week over the next few weeks, and I’m going to be linking to some research and you can explore these topics a little bit more in depth if you’d like.

Second Languages and Health: Surprising Benefits

So the first lessons that I learned or that I want to talk about, not that I’ve learned, are all about health and languages. In fact, these are some of the later lessons that I learned. I always felt like languages were great. I always felt like I was doing great brain training, great things for my brain, but I couldn’t really speak to it. I couldn’t speak about specifics. I knew it was good, but didn’t realize how good it was until I started really digging into the research in the past year or so.

And I’m so lucky. My book, The 5-Week Linguist, I got an opportunity to interview Dr. Thomas Bak, Who actually really helped me unpack and understand a lot of the research because a lot of it’s research that he did about how amazing languages are for health.

If you’re not familiar with Dr. Thomas Bak, he is a cognitive neuroscientist and he teaches at the University of Edinburgh. He was a professor at Cambridge for many years, super smart guy, incredibly brilliant. He speaks, I don’t even know how many languages well, and has a background as a medical doctor. And he originally was specializing… He did a PhD in acute aphasia, so sort of speech disorders sort of thing. And he got further and further into this field combining his vast knowledge of science and medicine and languages. So he did a study all about languages and dementia. So the first few lessons that we’re going to talk about today are really a lot of it’s based on Dr. Bak’s research.

Second Languages and Health: Ward Off Dementia

He had read some studies that were super interesting about the benefits of being bilingual on dementia. But the original study done in Canada had really been focused on a very homogeneous group of people. So there are lots of factors that could vary. So when he decided to really dive deep into learning does having another language in your life, at any point in your life, really help you ward off dementia? And so he did a study in Hyderabad India, which is a place where there’s no immigration. So people are not bilingual because they immigrated. And people are bilingual regardless of their level of education.

So when they found that having another language in your life wards off three different types of dementia by four to five years. It’s better than any drugs. And it also wards off vascular dementia. So as I understand that has to do with a stroke. So the next lesson that I learned is that apparently stroke victims who have more than one language in their life, it really aids in their recovery.

I’ve also started to make a really important decision that, really learned, taking in a lot more,