Foreign Accent Syndrome

I heard about the most bizarre condition recently.

A woman from ‘oop north’, with the requisite Northern vowels, went to bed one night and woke up the following morning speaking with a French accent.

At first people thought she was just messing about, but then it became apparent that this was now her normal voice. Everything came out as a peculiar sort of Franglais.

The woman herself was quite distraught. She felt as if she had lost herself – her personality, her identity, everything that she had been for the past forty-odd years. And her friends just didn’t know what to do with her. Many felt that she was ‘putting it on’ but her husband could confirm that the accent never slipped.

Over the last 60 years there have been about sixty reported cases of Foreign Accent Syndrome. It is a rare medical condition that affects the way speech is produced and is normally a side-effect of a stroke or other brain or head injury.

Researchers have discovered that specific parts of the brain – especially the cerebellum – control linquistic functions and if these are damaged or traumatised, the pitch, timing and tone of that person’s voice can be affected, as well as the way that they pronounce certain syllables, resulting in speech patterns that resemble those from another part of the country. They know what they want to say but the organisation of the articulation pattern is disrupted.

However, another theory being put forward is that it is not the language centres of the brain that are affected, but a loss of the fine motor skills required to pronounce phenomes with the usual accent and so it sounds different from their previous normal speaking voice. For example, missing out certain consonants that have become hard to pronounce.

Current studies are also investigating whether there is a genetic link.

The condition can be permanent or last for a few hours. Some people get professoinal help to try to revert to speaking with their old voice but it is a difficult process because Foreign Accent Syndrome changes the melody of your speech. Relearning how to speak with the old rhythms, consonants and specific sounds is not easy.

One woman awoke from her stroke surgery to discover that her Geordie accent had become Jamaican, whilst another American woman, who had suffered a brain injury nearly two decades earlier, began speaking with a Russian accent after having her neck adjusted by her chiropractor.

What experts do agree on is that it is auditory skills of the hearer which ‘labels’ the accent and that the two are not really connected. They are not reverting to a childhood accent or something they picked up from others. It’s just that the ability of the speaker to make certain sounds has changed, not that they are now native to another county, state or country.

Personally, the opportunity to swap my sloppy Estuary for a nice Frenchified accent would be very gratefully accepted.