By MAMAMIA TEAM
If you met Australian woman Leanne Rowe at a dinner party, you might come to the conclusion she’d spent most of her life living in France. But Leanne has never spent time in France.
She’s never eaten a croissant in Lyon, never slurped red wine in Nice or seen the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Leanne studied French at high school but has never had any French friends, or lived abroad. And that’s why it’s hard for her to explain to everyone she comes into contact with, why it is that she speaks with a French accent.
Eight years ago, Leanne was involved in a serious car accident. When she woke up at Melbourne’s Austin Hospital she had a broken back and a broken jaw. She also had a French accent.
“Slowly, as my jaw started to heal, they said that I was slurring my words because I was on very powerful tablets,” Leanne told the ABC in an interview last week.
But it soon became clear that that wasn’t the case.
Leanne suffers from Foreign Accent Syndrome. There have only been 62 cases of the syndrome reported since 1941, making it one of the rarest conditions in the world.
The other cases of the syndrome are just as baffling.
In 1999, American woman Tiffany Roberts woke up from a stroke with an English accent. Tiffancy says that people accuse her of lying when she says she was born in Indiana.
In 2009, 18-year-old British man George Harris suffered a brain hemorrhage while traveling in Slovakia and woke up with a thick Russian accent. George had lived in Russia for a period of time when he was young but said he had always sounded British when he was growing up.
Top Comments
alot of people are asking, what is there to be depressed about. or saying, so many people in australia have an accent....etc.
i think that it becomes an identity crises. not recognising your voice, the way u talk, have talked for all those years....that could be traumatic for some
I can totally understand how this could happen...I have only ever had three migraines, no actual headache but a brightness of vision and a numbness of my tongue that travelled all the way down my throat. During one of these episodes I was in Coles trying to purchase some cold meat at the deli and as hard as I could try, I could NOT get the words I was thinking out of my mouth. I felt so silly, but ended up laughing and pointing to get what I wanted! That you could have a permanent kind of disconnection of speech from a migraine is entirely plausible to me.