Whether we like our accent or not, most of us are stuck with it for life. That’s unless you’re one of the 100 or so people in the world who’ve been diagnosed with Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS).
These people can wake up one week with an American accent and switch to sounding Scottish the next.
Zoe Coles, who lives in Lincolnshire, is one of the people who suffers from the rare syndrome.
She made headlines earlier this year for appealing for medical help after waking up with a Welsh accent and she took to TikTok where she goes by @zoecoles1 to give viewers an update.
The Englishwoman revealed she’s been stuck with the Welsh accent for nearly five months and has shared her everyday struggles.
Her most recent video has already been seen by over 18,000 people in a week.
From being forced to have uncomfortable conversations to people not believing her syndrome is real, Zoe explained how it’s impacting her everyday life.
The pub worker originally developed a German accent before it morphed into Welsh, despite her having never been to Wales.
Last year she was diagnosed with a functional neurological disorder (FND) that affects motor control and speech.
She told viewers that she was in a clothes shop and a lady said to her that she loved her accent and asked where she was from and she said that she was from there and that she’d woken up with the accent and the lady didn’t believe her.
She said that the lady literally didn’t believe her and made her feel totally embarrassed and she just wanted the ground to open up and swallow her.
She said that she gets it a lot. People stop her and a lot of people that she’s serving ask her where she’s from and she said she does try to explain that she just wakes up like that and that she has foreign accent syndrome.
Stunned viewers sympathised with her, but one inquisitive person asked what happens when she tries to speak her original accent. Zoe said that it brings on tics and she’s unable to speak correctly.
Other people who suffer from the disorder include an American woman who woke up with a posh English accent after suffering a head injury and an Essex woman woke up one day speaking four different European accents.
Some people might make fun of this condition, but I can assure you that Foreign accent syndrome (FAS) is very real. It’s a condition where the way you talk changes and shifts in a way that’s sudden and extremely apparent.
There have been about 100 known cases of the syndrome since it was first reported. The most notable case was a Norwegian woman who was struck by shrapnel in World War II. She developed a German accent and was ostracised as a result.
Can foreign accent syndrome go away? It might revert back to your native accent in some cases, but it could also be a permanent change for others.
To date, about 200 cases of foreign accent syndrome have been documented in clinical studies, making it quite a rare speech disorder. Perhaps the best-known case was when the late George Michael briefly spoke with a West Country accent when he came out of a coma following a bout of pneumonia.
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