An Australian woman woke up from a serious car accident, and found she had developed a mutated speech pattern that caused her to speak with a French accent.
Leanne Rowe, a bus driver and member of the Army Reserve, had a car accident eight years ago. She woke up in Melbourne's Austin Hospital with a broken jaw and back, according to Medical Daily.
While in treatment Rowe took pills so strong it slurred her speech. When she finally was able to stop taking the pills and use her jaw again she realized her Australian accent had been replaced with a French one. Rowe had never been to France, so the phenomenon was completely unexpected. The once-proud Aussie now identifies herself as a recluse, ashamed of her new accent.
"It makes me so mad because I am Australian," Rowe said. "I am not French, [though] I do not have anything against the French people."
Rowe's doctor, Robert Newton, thinks the woman is suffering from a rarely seen disorder known as foreign accent syndrome (FAS).
"I would just like someone to stand up and say 'you do have' or 'you don't have it,'" Rowe said.
She's accepted that suppressing her accent in order to hide it from others is unhealthy. The condition is extremely rare, but it has been seen in the past. In 2010 a British woman, known only as Debbie, had a seizure rendering her unable to speak for nine months. When Debbie finally regained her speech she realized she had acquired a French accent.
Karen Croot, a University of Sydney psychologist, believes the speech disorder only coincidentally sounds French. Instead it is an arbitrary accent, which we prescribe our closest known label to.
"It's just an accident - an accident of chance that happens to that person - that what happens to their speech happens to overlap with the features of a known accent," she said.
Regardless of the condition's cause, Debbie and Rowe both found it difficult to adjust to their new dialects.
"I couldn't get to grips with the looks on people's faces when they heard me speak," Debbie said. "Not because I'm embarrassed, but...I have to learn who I am again."
See the ABC News video here.
