Researchers have found that bilinguals have better executive function (control over attention and the planning of complex tasks).
It has become fashionable to consider multilingualism as a kind of elite mental training. The question is not settled, though, for many studies have not been successfully replicated. Nor is it yet clear precisely which kinds of language skills and exposure make people better at exactly which tasks.(source)
-If you have more than one language you are forced to do a little more abstract reasoning such that you can connect the two ways of expressing the same idea.
-I don’t agree that exposure to multiple languages is confined to an elite. Just take as one example emigrant children. They grow up with their native language often spoken at home, whilst attending school and participating in the social fabric in the language of their ‘adopted’ country. That gives them valuable bilingual skills.
-a strategy for peace on earth? Make every child at a certain age or two, spend a summer with a family on the other side of the earth. Exposure to other races, cultures, religions, languages, is worth its weight in diamonds.
-One advantage not mentioned is the enrichment one gets from being able to read books from different cultures!
-Think of it this way: A language is just a means to express what one has in ones’ head. What one has in one’s head is what one sees, hears, smells, taste and feels – the five perceptual senses.
The more languages you know or are exposed to, the more keenly your perceptual senses develop. There is a lot of room in the head for languages. Every child can do it easily. The learning facilitates the healthy development of the brain.
Languages also come in different forms. Music is a language. Art is a language. Mathematics is a language. Law is a language.
People get intimidated too easily by languages. And they form a mental block to resist the learning of a language. The most effective block is to denigrate that which they can’t learn or think or are told they can’t learn.