Posted on 04/20/2010 6:57:07 AM PDT by Artemis Webb
A British woman has suddenly started speaking with a Chinese accent after suffering a severe migraine, she said in comments quoted by British media Tuesday.
Sarah Colwill believes she has Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS) which has caused her distinctive West Country drawl to be replaced with a Chinese twang, even though she has never even visited the country.
The 35-year-old from Plymouth, southwest England, is now undergoing speech therapy following an acute form of migraine last month which reportedly left her with a form of brain damage.
"I moved to Plymouth when I was 18 months old so I have always spoken like a local. But following one attack, an ambulance crew arrived and they said I definitely sounded Chinese," she said.
"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."
Colwill added: "The first few weeks of the accent was quite funny but to think I am stuck with this Chinese accent is getting me down. My voice has started to annoy me now. It is not my voice."
FAS has been documented around the world and is usually linked to a stroke or traumatic brain injury. It was first recorded in the early 20th century...
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
This has to be one of the weirdest stories ever. How rare is this?
It is really just a symptom of Needing Government Disability Cash, NGDC for short....look for her to claim compensation
I sometimes start speaking Spanish when I drink too much tequila...
I have a relative who had a terrible stutter until he had a brain aneurysm - the stutter is gone and acquired a quirky accent for a New Englander.
I am of Chinese descent. In high school, a Caucasian friend worked at a south suburban Chinese restaurant near Chicago. After about three months, I started to notice he would use the “pidgin” English the Chinese (mostly Cantonese) restaurant staff would use. My mom used to get a big kick out of his phone calls. It was pretty funny.
My first thought was stroke.
There are other causes as well, mostly neurological. One engineer I had worked with struggled hard to speak, and later on was completely unintelligible. He had to use a notepad. My first thought was that he had a stroke, however that was not the case. He died a year after he retired.
You see a lot of that here in Sweden. In fact, it's so widespread anytime anyone tells me something happened to them I wonder how "real" it is.
I’ve spoken different languages in my dreams. Seriously. Strange experience.
It sounds goulish, but neurological researchers live for this kind of information. They can't get it by direct experimentation, unfortunately, unless they're Hannibal Lecter.
Did they ever determine a physical cause?
She’s turning Japanese,
I think she’s turning Japanese,
I really think so.
A coworker who speaks nothing but English was staying with some friends who overheard her talking in her sleep. She was speaking German. One of those who overheard her was fluent in German and said that to the best of her understanding the sleep-talker was a Luftwaffe pilot radioing that he was in trouble. Now, that's strange.
Isn’t speaking with a *fake* accent racist? I mean, I know it’s fun and all, and it’s okay if it’s a southern accent (as long as you’re making fun of southerners), but I thought any imitation of any other accent was hateful, bigoted racism in this PC world we live in, regardless of intent?
Considering how many of us have mimicked a Monty Python line in a British accent that would make us all racist. :)
Wow. That’s amazing. I’ve been told I talk in my sleep, but no reports of German. But German was one of the languages I spoke. Also spoke Italian, Russian and Japanese. So strange!
Pretty much, he put the R's where they were supposed to be and left them out where they weren't.
Wickid Weiad...;)
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