Foreign Accent Syndrome: Arizona woman awakes with a British accent

A woman living in Arizona says she went to sleep with a “blinding headache” one night and awoke with a British accent, a condition doctors call Foreign Accent Syndrome.

Michelle Myers says she has not been able to shake her “Mary Poppins” London accent for two years, according to ABC affiliate KNXV.

It’s not the first time this has happened, according to Myers. She previously awoke from a pounding headache with an Irish lilt and later with an Australian accent. In this instance, Time says, the British accent stuck.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Foreign Accent Syndrome is a speech disorder that makes the sufferer sound like they have an accent from another country, according to the University of Texas Dallas.

The disorder is “easier to understand when you think about the minute changes that characterise what we perceive to be an accent,” says Business Insider. “Silence a few hard “r”s, curl the tongue on the occasional vowel, seal the lips, or swallow a consonant, and you’re suddenly speaking as someone might sound on a different continent.”

The condition is rare, with only about 60 cases reported in the past century, according to a 2011 study. In 2010, a woman in Virginia reportedly spoke with a Russian accent after she fell down the stairs and hit her head, says The Washington Post.