Waking up from a stroke with a foreign accent

Imagine waking up from a stroke or head injury and finding yourself speaking your native language again... but with a foreign accent. This happened a few years ago to an Australian woman who, after a road accident, began speaking English with a strong French accent. The scientific literature has also described the case of a patient, a doctor in the Czech army, who, after a stroke in 1914 that caused significant speech problems and an inability to write, recovered his speech after four months, but with unusual changes in his speech, marked by a Polish accent. These case studies, as rare as they are strange, fascinate neurologists. This disorder was dubbed "foreign accent syndrome" by neurologist Harry Whitaker in 1982.

In France – the case recently went viral – a thirty-year-old woman woke up in June 2014 with an English accent following tonsil surgery. More than ten years later, this peculiarity persists, as she recently recounted in Le Petit Courrier. The echo of the Loir Valley .

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