elsa o’brien lópez

Despite the value attributed to learning certain languages, the cognitive benefits of bilingualism tend to be overlooked. This can lead to parents’ choosing a monolingual education for their children when a bilingual option is also available and to the loss of a family’s heritage language.

The benefits of bilingualism have probably never been as undisputed as they currently are. However, even nowadays, it is mainly the economic benefits of learning a second language that are rarely questioned. Also, it is often the most widely spoken languages- such as English, Spanish, French or Chinese- that are taught as second languages in schools across the world.

It is because we tend to think of the economic advantages and future job prospects of learning a second language that we can forget the social and cultural opportunities that multilingualism brings.

Very often, minority languages suffer from this focus on the demands of a globalised economy. Learning any language, but especially a family’s heritage language, will help a child make connections, i.e.: with their extended family, understand cultural traditions and have a more flexible way of looking at the world.

Minority languages are often neglected when an immigrant family comes into a new country, in the hope of facilitating their children’s integration and ensuring academic success. This phenomenon is based on the belief that bilingualism will take up too many cognitive resources that are better off left available for other areas of learning. This is exacerbated by the fact that, more often than not, the educational system will not have in place an effective onboarding bilingual system for new arrivals.

More than half of people in the world – estimates vary from 60 to 75 per cent – speak at least two languages. This figure is probably enough to refute any argument that intends to portray bilingualism as a hindrance to learning, as it’s actually a naturally occurring situation in many countries.

Cognitive benefits

Bilingualism has many added benefits for our cognition. Bialystock (2015) and other researchers talk about the enhanced control of bilinguals over executive functions. Executive function and self-regulation skills are the mental processes that allow us to plan, focus attention, remember instructions, and multi-task. They depend on: working memory, mental flexibility, and self-control.

According to The Centre on the Developing Child of Harvard University, children aren’t born with these skills but with the potential to develop them. Providing them with opportunities to develop them will result in lifelong benefits for these individuals and society as a whole.

The reason why bilingualism can help develop executive functions is the fact that both languages are active in the brain of the bilingual speaker even when only one of the languages is being used. The executive function system is fortified when bilingual individuals have to select one language over the other one, or when they have to switch between them.

In research carried out by Ellen Bialystock in 2015, she observed how bilingual children outperform monolingual children in tasks that required ‘more effortful and controlled attention’.

Health benefits

Speaking more than one language fluently has also been reported to have health benefits later on in life. Research carried out by Craick, Bialystock and Freedman (2010) showed that bilingual patients had been diagnosed with Alzhaimers 4.3 years later than monolingual patients and had reported the symptoms 5.1 years after their monolingual counterparts.

The University of Edinburgh has also found that bilingual individuals suffering from a stroke are also twice as likely to recover from a stroke than multilingual people.

Learning a second language from an early age can be as important as learning it in the right way.

Learning a language at home that is different from the majority language in one’s country can be one of the easiest ways of developing multilingualism. Nowadays, many schools also offer the opportunity to learn a second majority language through communicative methodologies that try to replicate real-life learning environments. Despite all the aforementioned benefits, learning a language is a long process, most of which cannot be done explicitly. Therefore, it should be a joyful one. 

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