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Comment by Wolfenstein98k | Hacker News Reader

What does bilingualism correlate with?

It depends on the country.

In many countries, wealthier students receive more instruction in a foreign language and have access to full immersion programs.

If I'm not mistaken, speaking two languages in Spain is quite common. The country has multiple languages besides Spanish [1]. So I guess it doesn't correlate with much aside from the geographic region.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Spain

Speaking three is common, but there is often an appreciable and even obvious erosion in the mastery of some of them (limited vocabulary, misspellings..., mobile phones made lot of damage also in this field). We need to be aware of this point also

Having a logically structured thinking or being good in math (all related with having dementia or not) does not depend on how many times you can say 'street' in different languages.

Most of the world's population is multilingual [1], hence it doesn't correlate with much anything on a wider scale. The list of multilingual areas is very long and nuanced [2] and the implications and correlations in each location are as widely varied as the list itself.

As other commenters have already pointed out, the study took place in Barcelona, where multilingualism is prominent and doesn't correlate with any specific group or trait.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilingualism#Myths

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multilingual_countries...

Immigration?

Going to a school in Europe?

Living as a minority with its own language in a country with another language?

Or maybe just not being a native English speaker.

In the case of the article, it’s about living in a region where more than one language is locally spoken.

FWIW, the study was done in Barcelona, which (along with Montreal) is one of the most fully bilingual cities in the developed Western world.

So how does dementia incidence in Montreal compare with mono lingual regions?

I don't know. It would indeed be interesting to compare Montreal to Toronto or Vancouver.

141 000 Quebecois have Alzheimer or any other kind of neuro-degenerative disease, for 8.4 millions of people in Quebec.

Ontario has 14.57 millions inhabitants and about 250 000 people living with dementia.

That's 1.7% in Quebec vs 1.7% in Ontario. Bilinguism does not seem to protect people much outside of Barcelona.

EDIT: British Columbia has apparently somewhere around 70 000 people living with dementia for a population of 5.07 millions, which is about 1.4%.

I can think of many cities (even in Europe) where many people are fully bilingual (in the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden, Finland, in some regions of Italy, Austria and Croatia, etc...) - and if we go outside of Europe, well, in India, Ghana, Paraguay, etc... (just to select one instance across other continents), well, I'd say that bilingualism (or multilingualism) is almost a norm...

Yes, that’s true. I only meant that in the western developed world, Montreal and Barcelona are the only cities I can think of where the vast majority of people have native (or virtually so) proficiency in more than. One language.

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