Foreign Accent Syndrome Is A Real Thing

16:00 March 31, 2016
By: Bess Turner

Have you ever had the sudden desire to speak in a British accent? You might be suffering from foreign accent syndrome! Not really, but foreign accent syndrome is a real thing affecting more people than you think. It can develop from serious head trauma, strokes, even a migraine. The syndrome affects how one would pronounce specific, if random, words, and difficulty with things like consonant clusters, and changes in stress and intonation.

It's been documented around the world, too—there have been reported accent changes from Japanese to Korean, British English to French, American English to British English, and Spanish to Hungarian, according to a study at the University of Texas at Dallas. But before you start wondering if your next headache will suddenly let you speak perfect German, scientists are quick to say that foreign accent syndrome won't gift fluency in other languages. There have only been sixty-two recorded cases in the past sixty-eight years in the United States, though, so you never know!

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