I know it’s been a couple of months since I last blogged,
but after two months of everyone asking, “Are you still writing your blog?” I’ve
decided that yes, I am still writing my blog. So here you go.
Foreign accent syndrome (FAS) is a rare medical disorder in
which the patient develops a foreign accent. The accent usually occurs as the
result of a brain injury or stroke, but can also be the result of a migraine or
developmental problem. Foreign accent syndrome gets its name because those
listening to the affected person perceive them to have an accent, but in fact,
it’s not an accent, it’s a speech impediment that kind of sounds French,
Italian, Lithuanian, German, or Japanese.
Foreign accent syndrome, or FAS, was first identified in
1907 by a French neurologist, Pierre Marie. Another early case occurred in
Czech in 1919. In Norway in 1941, a woman in her 30s identified only as Astrid
L. sustained a head injury after being struck by shrapnel during an air raid. According
to one source, she suffered “a splintered skull and exposed brain,” which is
unfortunate, because I was eating whilst I wrote this. Though Astrid did
recover, she woke up with a German accent in perhaps the worst time and place
to have a German accent.
 |
| Uh-oh. |
As a result, she was “ostracized and sometimes refused
service in shops,” which is probably the best she could have hoped for under
the circumstances.
Only 62
cases of foreign accent syndrome were recorded between Astrid L. in 1941
and 2009. Documented
accent changes have included Spanish to Hungarian, British English to
French, American English to British, and Japanese to Korean. One British woman,
Kath Lockett, woke up
in 2006 with an Italian accent. A Canadian woman, Sharon Campbell-Rayment, fell
from a horse and developed a Scottish accent, complete with the use of “words
such as ‘wee,’ ‘grand,’ ‘awright,’ and ‘brilliant.’”
Ms. Campbell-Rayment, whose ancestors had emigrated to Canada more than
a century prior, decided this turn of events was “definitely a sign” and not in
any way random at all, like it actually was. She went so far as to travel to
Scotland with her husband to perform genealogy research, and is writing a book
about her experiences with traumatic brain injury (which has to be difficult,
given she’s experienced a traumatic brain injury). Another British woman, Sarah
Colwill, went into hospital with a migraine in 2010 and woke up with a Chinese
accent. Hilariously, Ms. Colwill can no longer say the word can’t: “I always
say ‘you can not,’ because otherwise it comes out, ‘you cunt,” she
told The Huffington Post.
All jokes aside, most people (with the exception of Ms.
Campbell-Rayment, who is Canadian after all), seem pretty distraught about
their new accents. Ms. Lockett told the Mirror that she felt like she’d been “robbed”
of her native accent, and Ms. Colwill told documentary filmmakers that “you don’t
even know who you are anymore.” I mean, wow. I’d like to think that I’d still
know who I was no matter what accent I had, and I’m saying that as someone whose
accent has changed quite a lot over the past 15 years thanks to living
literally everywhere, but maybe that’s just me.
The speech changes that occur with FAS are usually
consistent, and include deletion, distortion, or substitution of consonants;
prolongation, distortion, or substitution of vowels; and unusual prosody, or
the rhythm and intonation of speech. The disorder appears to occur due to
damage to specific parts of the brain, those that control linguistic functions
including speech patterns and pitch. The cerebellum may also be implicated.
Though people with FAS don’t actually gain the ability to speak the language
whose accent they’ve developed, it is possible for others, especially children,
to pick up the new accent from the affected person.
