[thisoneisreal]

One thing I've never seen discussed on this topic (possible I just missed it, I only read popular accounts) is whether speaking multiple languages is a proxy for higher sociability / stronger social ties. That's a known dimension that improves health and aging and I wonder if just being able or interested in speaking with a broader swath of people is what helps more than the cognitive demands of switching.

[elpakal]

Raised multilingual here (as in father spoke one, mother spoke another, living abroad and US back and forth). I don't know about the stronger social ties but I have found that thinking in a different language helps me get to sleep easier. There are times when I'm spinning around in webs in English (work, life etc) at night, and when I switch over to Spanish thoughts I fall asleep easier.

Maybe just stuff like that is enough to make a difference.

[cyberax]

Switching into another language also helps if you are stuck in an environment where you do not want to pay attention (e.g. on a bus with blaring ads that you can't mute or with a rude neighbor yapping on their phone).

[iLemming]

> helps me get to sleep easier

I grew up speaking multiple languages. My monolingual friend once asked in which language I dream, and I said - "not sure, I think in all three different ones I'm currently fluent". "But how do you know?", he kept pressing. "Ah, well, they come with subtitles", I joked. But since then I often wonder, how do we recognize a language in our dreams?

[inigyou]

I think my dreams use semantic vectors that come with a tag saying they came from sensory input even though they didn't.

I am mostly monolingual but I would expect them to come with a language tag too. I believe a dream about Bob talking about cats in Spanish would directly activate your neural network like V_cats + V_spanish + V_bob_is_talking without activating the parts that would decode auditory input into that semantic vector.

[HPsquared]

That's nice, like the brain switching to "home mode" maybe?

[barrenko]

Learned some french recently, heavy bouts of insomnia due to moving / stress - I will try this advice exactly this night.

[timr]

> One thing I've never seen discussed on this topic (possible I just missed it, I only read popular accounts) is whether speaking multiple languages is a proxy for higher sociability / stronger social ties.

Yes. This is exactly what you should be asking with this kind of stuff. The research is hopelessly confounded by social status traits that correlate with wealth.

And before anyone says it, the abstract claiming "adjustment for linguistic, physical, and sociopolitical exposome factors" is fine, but it's essentially impossible to control for something as pervasive as the effects of wealth, without randomization. There are also factors -- like the culture you grew up in -- that are equally difficult to control. For example, if your dataset has only X multi-lingual Americans, and 1000x multi-lingual Western Europeans, no amount of statistical massage will correct for the imbalance.

[comrade1234]

Learning German hasn't made me more sociable.

[CalRobert]

sounds like you integrated well!

[westurner]

But there was neurogenesis.

And, just thinking about other cultures

[fluoridation]

But it still counters the claim that multilingualism is a proxy for high sociability. I speak two languages (and I'm working on a third) and most days I don't speak to anyone.

[westurner]

99% of users are lurkers.

I also find myself exercising verbal skills possibly unnecessarily (with a language learning app that's certainly not immersion) but probably predictably.

I've heard that they say to exercise mental arithmetic skills if stranded on a desert island with no reading material; and that it's normal to develop self dialogue in solitary

[markerz]

In my world, most multilingual speakers are children of immigrant families, and that transcends socio-economic boundaries. Plenty of immigrants were already wealthy before coming to the SF Bay Area, where we import highly educated, specialized workers. On the other hand, we also import physical laborers who are also generally multilingual but not in the same social class.

Some of these immigrants are very well supported with a strong social network, while others struggle with isolation.

[paulsutter]

On first reading I assumed you meant the physical laborers would have the stronger social network, and the wealthy would be more isolated (true in my experience). But you may have meant just the opposite!

In fact it's two separate questions because it can go both ways, heavily.

Interesting food for thought, thanks for posting.