Woman goes to sleep British, wakes up French

Leane Picheria- Draft

Kay Russell, a grandmother from a village in southwestern England has suffered from migraines for over twenty years. After one extreme migraine, she was left with slurred speech for two weeks, so she made an appointment with a neurologist and scheduled an MRI scan. Then one day, she woke up with a French accent.

Sound strange?

Doctors attribute this phenomenon to Foreign Accent Syndrome, a rare condition that damages the part of the brain that controls speech and word formation. This condition currently has no cure and can last for days, years, or permanently.

“As a sufferer of this syndrome you are not trying to speak in an accent, it is a speech impediment,” Russell said. “My facial muscle movements are different, the inclination is different and the pronunciation. It also affects my hands and makes me write with a foreign accent. For example, I say peoples not people and that is how I would write it.”

Russell also excludes important words such as “a,” “of,” and “to,” and cannot put on any other accent.

Russell said she is most commonly mistaken for French or Eastern European, but the syndrome goes much deeper than her voice.

“A lot of people come up [to me] and say, ‘what a lovely voice you have.’ You lose your identity and an awful lot about yourself. I feel like I come across as a different person,” Russell said.

Between 1941 and 2009, there have been sixty recorded cases. To the untrained ear, people with Foreign Accent Syndrome sound as though they speak their native languages with a foreign accent; for example, an American native speaker of English might sound as though they spoke with an English accent, or a native British speaker might sound as though they have a New York accent.

Researchers at Oxford University have found that specific parts of the brain were injured in some cases, and damage to those specific parts could play a big role in the altered pitch, mispronounced syllables, and distorted speech patterns.

Pronouncing the letter “R” at the end of words might be a challenge after damage to the brain, which forces the speaker who used to pronounce hard “R’s” to simply not pronounce them. For example, people who speak with Boston accents do not pronounce hard “R’s,” so those who are unaware that the speaker has FAS might mistake their accent to be Bostonian, even though other features of the Boston accent might be completely left out.

People with FAS might find speaking in a different accent to be much easier than their original after certain motor skills have been lost.