A women from a village in southwestern England says a severe migraine attack left her speaking with what sounds like a French accent - a very rare condition which neuroscientists have dubbed the Foreign Accent Syndrome, essentially leaving life-long locals sounding like they come from thousand of kilometers away.

Kay Russell, 49, is not the only person to have ever experienced this rare condition. Previous cases have included people whose newly-found accents sounded German, Spanish, Welsh, Italian and even Irish.Although the syndrome has become more pronounced in recent years, approximately 60 people have been said to suffer from this syndrome dating back to the year 1941.According to neuroscientists, Foreign Accent Syndrome occurs as a side-effect of severe brain injury such as a stroke, head trauma or extreme migraine attacks. Researchers at Oxford University found that certain parts of the brain were injured in some Foreign Accent Syndrome cases, indicating that certain parts of the brain control various linguistic functions and if damaged, it could result in altered pitch or mispronounced syllables, causing speech patterns to be distorted.

The main reason believed to cause Foreign Accent Syndrome is a simple shift in the way people move their mouths or emphasize certain syllables following a stroke or brain injury. According to Sophie Scott, a researcher at the University College London’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, “People might put little vowel sounds in their speech, so that they might-a-sound-a-little-a-like-a-this- that’s read by English speakers as being an Italian accent.

Although many people practice for years and even attend classes to adapt and learn a new accent, for the patients suffering from Foreign Accent Syndrome, it’s not everything that it’s made out to be.Scott says many patients end up feeling alienated because they feel as if they don’t belong in their home towns anymore nor in the country whose accent they have adopted because they do not speak the accent completely, only in certain words and phrases.“It’s not only that you don’t sound like who you are anymore,” she said.” You don’t sound like the others around you either.”

Not surprisingly, many sufferers actively try to adopt their new accent in every aspect of speech so they don’t feel so abnormal, they might find that speaking in a different accent is much easier than their usual accent which then becomes consistently difficult to pronounce after some motor skills have been lost.

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