Well I guess I developed it too, playing too much GTA 4 over a 6-month period! Or maybe I just like the accent of Eastern Europeans and want to sound like them. I so wish one day I wake up with an Irish accent -- that's the only cool accent I can't do no matter how hard I try.
Strange world!
A woman from Devon has begun speaking with a Chinese accent after suffering severe migraines.
Thirty-five-year-old Sarah Colwill puts the startling change down to an extremely rare medical condition known as Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS).
"I knew I sounded different but I didn't know how much and people said I sounded a bit Chinese.
"Then I had another attack and when the ambulance crew arrived they said I definitely sounded Chinese."
The rare disorder is thought to be caused by strokes and brain injuries and causes sufferers to lose the ability to talk in their native accent.
There have been an estimated 60 recorded cases of FAS since it was first identified in the 1940s.
I am frustrated to sound like this. I just want my own voice back, but I don't know if I will get it back.
Sarah Colwill
Mrs Colwill, who lives in St Budeaux in Plymouth, Devon, with her husband Patrick said her accent change had been startling.
"I spoke to my stepdaughter on the phone from hospital and she didn't recognise who I was.
"She said I sounded Chinese. Since then I have had my friends hanging up on me because they think I'm a hoax caller."
After researching FAS on the internet Mrs Colwill has been in contact with doctors from Oxford University who are interested in studying her plight.
She is undergoing speech therapy to try to revert to her West Country accent.
"I am frustrated to sound like this. I just want my own voice back, but I don't know if I will get it back."
John Coleman, a professor of phonetics at Oxford University, said: "FAS is extremely diverse, almost certainly not 'one thing', not a well-defined medical phenomenon.
Sarah Colwill -Pics from SWNS agreed by Grippo
Sarah Colwill says her stepdaughter failed to recognise her voice
"It is not the kind of problem that there are any easy generalisations about."
Sufferers can develop an accent without ever having been exposed to it as it is the change in speech patterns from a brain injury which causes the lengthening of syllables, change in pitch or mispronunciation of sounds.
Experts believe FAS is triggered following a stroke or head injury, when tiny areas of the left side of the brain linked with language, pitch and speech patterns are damaged.
The result is often a drawing out or clipping of the vowels that mimic the accent of a particular country, even though the sufferer may have had limited exposure to that accent.
One of the first reported cases was in 1941 when a Norwegian woman developed a German accent after being hit by bomb shrapnel during an air raid.
As a result, she was shunned by her community, who falsely believed she was a German spy.
In 2006 Linda Walker, 60, woke from a stroke to find that her Geordie accent had been transformed into a Jamaican one. (Sky News)
Look at some of the comments. One said it's all fake because she is now using incorrect English grammar like many Chinese people in UK. Haha I'd be rich if you'd give me a pound for every time I hear a British speaking with an incorrect English grammar even with a British accent. Allow. It's normal to say "How's you" and not "How're you"...
It's funny because only few weeks back I watched this episode of TV series Lost, where this South Korean lady forgot how to speak English after she hit her head and became unconscious. Now she could speak and understand English before that happened, but after the accident, she can understand English and write in English but can't speak English. I thought that's only possible in a strange serial such as Lost, but not in the real world. Well, reality is often stranger than fiction!
wow thats so weird. The human mind is quite complex I doubt we will ever fully understand it.
ReplyDeleteHuman mind and soul is beyond our comprehension. I doubt if cases like this can be accurately studied because of its random and rare nature. It says "Sufferers can develop an accent without ever having been exposed to it as it is the change in speech patterns from a brain injury which causes the lengthening of syllables, change in pitch or mispronunciation of sounds." How realistic is this saying?
ReplyDeleteAccents are primarly based on the person's surrounding and environment, not race. Otherwise ethnically South Asians/Eastern Europeans would not be able to have a british/american accent even if they were born and brought up in UK/USA. Experience supports this too.
assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wabarakatuh,
ReplyDeletethe only explanation I can think of is that she became possessed by a jinn. I was present once when Sheikh Musa al Naser (one of Sheik al Albani's rahimullah's students) was here in Canada doing ruqyah. I saw first hand sisters whose voices changed and became something else. One sister who was unable to speak the language of her parents perfectly, suddenly spoke the language fluently and perfectly due to the fact that she became possessed by a jinn from that area. Someone did sihr on her and sent the jinn from across the world. May Allah ta'ala heal her, ameen.