How speaking another language translates into higher relational intelligence

Most conversations about bilingualism focus on the obvious advantage: the ability to speak with more people. But that framing undersells what is actually happening. Speaking more than one language does not just expand who you can talk to. It changes how you listen, how you read a room, and how naturally you take the perspective of someone whose experience differs from your own.

That capacity, the ability to understand another person's point of view without being told to, is what researchers call relational intelligence. And the evidence that bilingualism develops it is more robust than most people realise.

What does the research actually show?

One of the clearest demonstrations comes from a study conducted at the University of Chicago, led by researcher Samantha Fan. The experiment involved 72 children with a mean age of five, divided into three groups: monolinguals who spoke only English, bilinguals who spoke two languages, and children who spoke primarily English but had regular exposure to another language at home.

Each child was asked to play a simple game involving objects arranged in a grid. The child could see all the objects, but the adult interviewer across the grid could not see everything. When the adult asked the child to move the smallest object, the correct response required the child to suppress their own view and reason from the adult's limited perspective, choosing the medium-sized object rather than the smallest one visible to them.

Monolingual children responded correctly around 50 per cent of the time. Bilingual children succeeded 77 per cent of the time, a difference of nearly 30 percentage points. But the finding that arguably matters more is this: children who simply lived with regular exposure to another language, without necessarily being fluent speakers themselves, also outperformed monolinguals. The exposure itself, not just the fluency, was doing something developmentally significant.

"Multilingual exposure may promote effective communication by enhancing perspective taking. For millennia, multilingual exposure has been the norm. Our study shows that such an environment may facilitate the development of perspective-taking tools that are critical for effective communication." Samantha Fan, University of Chicago

Perspective-taking is the cognitive foundation of relational intelligence. It is what allows a person to sense what another needs before being asked, to communicate in a way that lands for the listener rather than just the speaker, and to navigate ambiguity without defaulting to their own frame of reference.

Why is this about more than language?

The study's authors were careful to note that it is not the mechanical act of switching between grammars that produces these effects. It is the social experience of growing up in a multilingual environment.

When a child learns to navigate two languages, they also learn to track who speaks what, who understands which vocabulary, and how to adjust their communication for different audiences. They develop what linguists call sociolinguistic sensitivity at an early age. They become attuned to the fact that meaning is not fixed. The same word, the same gesture, the same silence can land very differently depending on who is in the room.

This is the relational upside of code-switching: not just the ability to switch languages, but the habit of calibrating communication to the person in front of you. It is a skill that monolinguals can absolutely develop, but multilingual exposure accelerates it.

What does relational intelligence look like in practice?

For organisations, relational intelligence is not a soft concept. It has direct commercial and operational consequences.

Consider what it means in a client-facing context. A person with strong relational intelligence reads the room differently. They notice when a message is landing and when it is not. They adjust without being told to. They build trust faster, navigate disagreement more deftly, and are less likely to create misunderstanding through blunt or culturally tone-deaf communication.

In diverse teams, relational intelligence is what allows collaboration to actually work across cultural difference rather than just coexist alongside it. It is the difference between a team that tolerates diversity and one that draws genuine insight from it.

Bilingual speakers tend to have a higher relational intelligence. This shows up in how they build relationships, how they read cultural signals, and how they adapt their communication in real time. That is not a personality trait. It is a capability developed through years of navigating multiple linguistic and cultural contexts simultaneously.

The implication for hiring and communication strategy is significant. Bilingual and multilingual staff are not just a translation resource. They are a relational asset, particularly in any organisation that needs to communicate across cultural or community lines.

Why this matters in multicultural Australia

Australia is one of the most linguistically diverse countries on earth. According to the ABS Census 2021, more than 300 languages are spoken across Australian households, and approximately 22 per cent of Australians speak a language other than English at home. In cities like Sydney and Melbourne, that figure rises considerably, with many suburbs where English is the second or third most common household language.

For government agencies, healthcare providers, legal services, and any organisation communicating with the broader Australian public, this has a practical consequence: a significant share of your audience is processing your communication through the filter of another language and another cultural frame of reference.

The instinctive response is to treat this as a translation problem. Translate the document, run it through a language check, and publish. But translation is the beginning of the solution, not the whole of it. The deeper work is understanding how meaning shifts across cultural contexts, not just linguistic ones.

That is where relational intelligence, built through genuine multicultural experience and expertise, becomes the differentiating factor. It is what separates a translated document that technically says the right thing from a communication that actually connects with the community it is meant for.

The connection between language, culture and effective communication

The research on bilingualism and relational intelligence points to something that experienced multicultural communications practitioners have understood for a long time: language and culture are inseparable.

When you translate a message, you are not just converting words from one system to another. You are navigating a set of cultural assumptions embedded in the original, deciding what to carry across and what needs to be reconceived for the audience it is now intended for. That process requires the communicator to hold two perspectives at once: the intent of the sender and the context of the receiver.

That is precisely the cognitive skill that multilingual experience develops. And it is why teams built around genuine multicultural expertise, not just linguistic fluency, produce consistently stronger outcomes in community communication, government engagement, and multicultural campaign work.

The 30 percentage point gap in the University of Chicago study is striking in its simplicity. But what it points to is a way of engaging with the world: one that treats other perspectives not as a problem to manage, but as information essential to communicating well.