‘The Power of Language’: 5 ways multilingual brains work differently

How does speaking multiple languages affect the mind?

For decades, that question was pushed aside as researchers considered a “standard” brain to be one that knows only one language. But now, more than ever, that assumption is wildly inaccurate.

Today, the majority of the world’s population speaks at least two languages. In Europe, fully two-thirds of the population is bilingual or multilingual.

“There are a lot of people out there who are bilingual and multilingual,” says Moldovan-American psycholinguist Viorica Marian. “It would help to understand how that multilingual mind works, because very likely that's the future of humanity, especially if you consider artificial languages and other symbolic systems as languages.”

Professor Marian was one of the pioneers in the field of psycholinguistics and has been studying multilingual brains since the 1990s. In her new book “The Power of Language: Multilingualism, Self and Society” she explores the body of research surrounding multilingualism – including some of her own – explaining it in simple, understandable terms.

According to that research, the multilingual brain functions very differently from the “standard” monolingual brain when it comes to memory, decision-making, creativity, ageing and more.

“People who speak more than one language or dialect have different linguistic, cognitive, and neural architectures than people who speak only one language,” Marian writes in the book.

“For us to study the mind in this abstract way as if it's monolingual – just one language, one mind – is very much a missed opportunity and it gives us an inaccurate understanding of how the mind works,” she told Euronews Culture.

Here are five ways bilingual and multilingual brains work differently,