News just in: Bilingualism will save your life! Well, kind of...

OK, so that title may be just a little sensationalist, but the neurological advantages of being bilingual did make the homepage of the New York Times this week, thanks to this interview with the highly-esteemed Professor Ellen Bialystok (U.York, Toronto), one of the foremost scholars of bilingualism today.

It's fantastic to see current topics in linguistics getting the limelight they deserve, particularly because language, language use and the advantages thereof affect millions and millions of people worldwide every second, even if they don't take much time to think about it. It's also good to see linguistics increasingly recognised as a science, with studies and experiments and analyses of outcomes just as rigorous as anything you'll find in any of the traditional sciences.

Could studies on bilinguals rewrite this diagram?
Image from whatthehealthmag.wordpress.com

That's enough hyperbole for now though - more important is what Professor Bialystok had to say. Her area of study is bilingual adults, and she has found that cognitive functioning in bilinguals resists the normal ageing process better than in monolinguals. Furthermore, symptoms of that terrible condition, Alzheimer's, emerge much slower in bilinguals than in monolinguals. This all points to some very interesting things going on the brains of bilinguals, and Bialystok even suggests that the networks and "wiring" in the brain can be very different in bilinguals, to the point that language centres are successfully being used for completely non-verbal tasks.

I greatly look forward to seeing how this field develops, and hopefully contributing towards it in some small way. In the meantime, I'd better skype one of my French friends and hit the German books again, this could do me some serious good in the long run...

And in the news today...
--UK helicopters have entered Libyan airspace for the first time in the continuing conflict there
--A Chinese teenager sells his kidney on the black market...and uses the money to buy an iPad
--England reach over 400 against Sri Lanka in the 2nd test at Lord's