More than half the world learns more than one language as a child. While we in the monolinguistic world might think that has no bearing on success, there turn out to be many benefits to being bilingual or multilingual. To see those benefits, all we have to do is look at children.
The social benefits of speaking multiple languages are obvious; it broadens your social pool to be able to communicate with more people. But there are other benefits that also come to bear during the life of a bilingual child.
First, cognitive effects are being rapidly studied in science, trying to get a hold on what skills bilinguals are more suited for than people who just speak one language. From the outset, those skills seem to be related to considering different points of view, sorting out conflicting information, and disregarding whatever might be irrelevant. This is probably due to the bilingual having to be of “two minds” more often.
Tags: Bilingual • Enterprise & Education • language learning benefits • Multilingual