In the age of a highly interconnected world where people on the opposite ends of the globe are able to communicate in a matter of seconds, the world can indeed seem smaller. However, globalization has also exposed people to great amounts of diverse ethnicities, cultures, and perhaps most importantly, languages.

In 2015, the U.S. Census Bureau released a set of tables with information compiled from surveys conducted by the American Community Survey from 2009 to 2013 showed that at least 350 languages are spoken in U.S. homes. There are numerous benefits to being bilingual as it can be a way to connect with a wider range of people in one’s community who may not speak English. Mr. Mason-D’Croz, a World Language teacher at Lincoln Northeast believes that this is one of many advantages of being bilingual, “There are people in our community that speak so many different languages that come from different backgrounds, being able to communicate with somebody in their native language can make them feel a lot less anxious about having a conversation,” says Mason.

In an increasingly globalized world, being able to communicate with those who speak a different language is a very practical skill. According to Ethnologue in 2014, Chinese and Spanish were the two most spoken languages in the world. Mandarin Chinese in particular, the official language of the People’s Republic of China, Republic of China (Taiwan) and Singapore, has a total of over one billion people who speak it as either their first or secondary language. Spanish is the official language of 22 countries and is spoken by over 400 million people. Being bilingual gives one the potential to be able to communicate with a massive portion of today’s population.

Besides these practical advantages, Mason also believes there are great cognitive benefits to being bilingual. “There’s lots of evidence behind being bilingual making everything a little bit easier in school because if you are bilingual, you have to be able to decode and then encode in two different fashions. So, it makes your brain work in different ways, as you have those different compartments in your brain. It’ll make you be able to think and understand things in a different level,” says Mason. According to the American Speech Language Learning Association, these kinds of advantages include being able to learn new words easily, breaking down words by sounds, being able to use information in new ways, putting words into categories, coming up with solutions to problems and improved communication skills such as listening. Additionally, because bilingual people are able to process information in other ways there is strong evidence their brains have a significantly different structure than a monolingual brain.

Other studies also indicate that learning a second language can possibly help delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Dr. Ronald Petersen, director of the Mayo Clinic’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center writes, “It’s thought that activities that develop cognitive reserve work because they increase the robustness of your brain’s architecture by enriching blood flow, enhancing neuronal activity and putting more of your brain to use. This may compensate for the loss of diseased parts of the brain.” Being bilingual may also increase the amount of gray matter in the brain, which is tissue packed with information-processing nerve cells and fibers.

“If I had my way, I would say we should have at least one or two bilingual schools in the city that start teaching English coupled with another language. Studies have shown that the earlier you start, the better your language ability will be and students will be higher achieving,” says Mason.