Children who grow up with more than one language navigate the world differently. They move between different ways of expressing themselves, different cultural expectations, and different understandings of what certain words and feelings mean. That navigation, some research suggests, may do something interesting for how they understand other people (1, 2).
A growing body of evidence points to associations between bilingual experience and the development of empathy — particularly the cognitive kind: the capacity to understand another person's perspective, and to hold in mind that their experience of a situation may be quite different from your own (3, 4).
The picture is not simple, and not all studies agree. The question of how language shapes social understanding is a genuinely interesting one — with implications for how families and educators think about multilingual children and the environments they grow up in.
Bilingual children have always known the same feeling can be held in different words
Think about what it takes to switch languages mid-conversation. Not just the vocabulary, but all the adjustment that comes with it — the shift in register, the change in what's considered direct or indirect, the different emotional weight that certain phrases carry. For adults who've learned a second language later in life, it can feel like a kind of code-switching of the self.
For children who grow up with two languages from the beginning, this is simply how the world works. They've always had more than one way of reaching for meaning. They've always known, at some level, that the same feeling can be held in different words, and that different people reach for different ones.
It's worth asking what that experience might do to a child's understanding of other people — and whether it might make some things about empathy come a little more naturally.
Bilingual children may develop the ability to understand other people's perspectives earlier
One of the more consistently supported findings in this area concerns the capacity to understand that other people have their own thoughts, beliefs, and intentions that may differ from your own. Some studies suggest that bilingual children tend to develop this capacity somewhat earlier and more robustly than monolingual peers (1, 2).
One proposed reason is that managing two language systems requires children to hold in mind the perspective of their conversation partner — to track who knows which language, to adjust their output accordingly, and to monitor whether they're being understood. This kind of constant perspective-monitoring may exercise some of the same cognitive machinery that underlies social understanding more broadly (3).
Some evidence also suggests that even exposure to multiple languages — without full fluency — appears to be associated with improved performance on perspective-taking tasks in young children. The effect may lie less in mastery than in the experience of navigating multiple ways of making sense of the world (4).
At a neurological level, some researchers point to structural differences in the brains of bilingual individuals in regions associated with attention, emotional regulation, and the monitoring of competing signals (5). These are not dramatic differences, and the interpretation of brain imaging data in this area is still actively debated. The pattern is suggestive, though, of a genuine overlap between the systems used for language management and those used for social and emotional reasoning.
Each language carries different emotions — and bilingual children hold both at once
There's a particular experience that many bilingual people describe: the sense that some feelings are more easily named in one language than the other. That certain words carry an emotional texture that their translation simply doesn't. That home, and comfort, and the softer parts of identity tend to live most naturally in whichever language was spoken first.
Some evidence supports this. One study found that empathy scores and emotional resonance were higher when people engaged with material in their first language rather than their second — suggesting that language familiarity shapes not just comprehension but emotional depth (6). This has practical implications for families: emotional conversations, expressions of warmth, and the processing of difficult feelings may land differently depending on which language is used.
For multilingual children, this dual experience — emotional depth in the first language, social flexibility across both — may combine into something richer than either alone. One influential view in linguistics suggests that bilingual individuals develop a distinct kind of understanding that allows them to hold multiple cultural and emotional realities simultaneously, rather than simply switching between them (7). This pluralistic orientation may be one of the most meaningful long-term gifts of a bilingual childhood.
Speaking two languages means absorbing two different views of the world and how it works
Language transmits information and ways of understanding the world. A child who speaks Spanish at home and English at school is absorbing two different sets of assumptions about how emotions are expressed, how respect is signalled, how directness is valued, how relationships are structured. The movement between those two systems tends to make both more visible.
In many communities around the world, this kind of multilingual navigation is simply how childhood works — an ordinary feature of life in families and neighbourhoods that span multiple cultural worlds. Some evidence from this context suggests that bilingual students report greater ease with perspective-taking and empathy in intercultural friendships, and that the experience of living between languages tends to develop a natural fluency in reading social difference (8).
Indigenous language traditions offer a particularly rich dimension here. Many Indigenous languages encode relational and ecological understandings of the world that have no direct equivalent in dominant languages — ways of describing connection, responsibility, and community that carry different assumptions about the self and its relationship to others. Where children have access to these languages alongside others, the expansion of perspective may go well beyond what any single framework can offer.
The link between bilingualism and empathy is real but complicated — not all research agrees
The link between bilingualism and empathy is not a clean or settled finding. A 2025 study examined this directly and found no overall difference in empathy or emotional intelligence between bilingual and monolingual groups — a significant result that sits in tension with some of the earlier literature (6). The finding that emotional resonance was stronger when processing in the first language may matter more than bilingualism itself as a category.
There's also a genuine question about causation and confounding. Children who grow up bilingual often grow up in environments that are also multicultural — with exposure to different traditions, values, and social contexts that may independently support empathy development. Separating the effect of language from the effect of cultural immersion is methodologically difficult, and many studies have not fully done so. What looks like a bilingual advantage may sometimes be a cultural exposure advantage, or an environmental richness advantage, or an effect of particular kinds of parenting that happen to co-occur with multilingual homes.
None of this diminishes the interest of the question — it does mean that the enthusiasm for bilingualism as a route to empathy is best held with some care, and that the conditions around multilingual experience matter as much as the fact of it.
What tends to support multilingual children's social and emotional development
For families and educators navigating multilingual environments, the evidence points less toward a programme and more toward a set of conditions. What tends to matter is how actively a child is supported in using both languages, how emotionally available both are, and what kind of cultural engagement surrounds the language experience.
Some patterns that many families and educators have found useful to support multilingual children’s social understanding:
Protect the first language for emotional depth. Some evidence suggests that children process emotion most deeply in their first language (6). Families often find that emotional conversations — expressions of warmth, repair after conflict, discussions of difficult feelings — land most fully when held in the language a child feels most at home in. This is not about limiting the second language. Instead, it's about honouring the emotional geography of both.
Early exposuredoesn'trequire fluency. A growing body of work points to the idea that even minimal exposure to multiple languages in early childhood is associated with improvements in perspective-taking, independently of fluency (4). The experience of hearing that the same idea can be expressed differently appears to do something useful on its own. Families with access to more than one language don't need to wait for proficiency before the social benefits begin.
Keep both languages active. The benefits associated with bilingualism appear to be stronger in children who actively use both languages rather than passively knowing one (6). Environments — at home or in educational settings — that genuinely make space for both languages, rather than treating one as primary and one as supplementary, tend to support deeper engagement with each.
Let cultural diversityaccompanythe language. Some researchers have found that cultural exposure may be as important as language experience in building empathy (6). Multilingual environments that are also culturally engaged — where different traditions, perspectives, and ways of expressing emotion are treated with genuine curiosity rather than tolerance — appear to support more than those where multiple languages are used within a single cultural frame.
In classrooms, create space for home languages. Lots of researchers have found that allowing multilingual students to draw on their home languages when expressing feelings or discussing complex ideas leads to richer emotional engagement and stronger peer connections (8). Classrooms where this is genuinely welcomed, rather than managed, tend to find that it opens rather than disrupts the shared learning environment.
Growing up bilingual means learning early that no single language holdsall ofhuman experience
Language is one of the deepest ways human beings have of reaching toward each other. It carries meaning, feeling, information, and identity — a whole inherited understanding of what kind of creature a person is and what they owe to others.
Children who grow up with more than one language are given, from the beginning, a kind of proof that none of this is fixed. That the same experience can be held in different words, that other people arrive at meaning differently, and that this difference is not a problem to be resolved but a richness to be inhabited.
Whether or not the research eventually settles the question of exactly how bilingualism shapes empathy, that early lesson in the plurality of human expression seems, in itself, like something worth having.
References:
[1] Feng J, Cho S, Luk G. Assessing Theory of Mind in bilinguals: a scoping review on tasks and study designs. Biling Lang Cogn. 2024;27(4):531–545. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1366728923000585
[2] Javor R. Bilingualism, Theory of Mind and perspective-taking: the effect of early bilingual exposure. Psychol Behav Sci. 2016;5(6):143. https://doi.org/10.11648/j.pbs.20160506.13
[3] Sun H, Yussof NTB, Mohamed MBH, Rahim AB, Bull R, Cheung MWL, et al. Bilingual language experience and children's social-emotional and behavioural skills: a cross-sectional study of Singapore preschoolers. Int J Biling Educ Biling. 2021;24(3):324–339. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2018.1461802
[5] Burgaleta M, Sanjuan A, Ventura-Campos N, Sebastian-Galles N, Avila C. Bilingualism at the core of the brain: structural differences between bilinguals and monolinguals revealed by subcortical shape analysis. NeuroImage. 2016;125:437–445. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2015.09.073
[6] Ward R, Ragosko M. Does language experience and bilingualism shape empathy and emotional intelligence? Int J Biling. 2025. https://doi.org/10.1177/13670069241308078
