Allo! Allo! syndrome: Meet the Yorkshirewoman who woke up with a French accent, and the Brummie who started speaking like an Italian



Fickle voice: Richard Murray, pictured with his wife Amy, suffers from Foreign Accent Syndrome

Wendy Hasnip is now used to the routine. Climbing into a taxi, she tells the driver where she wants to go, then waits for the inevitable questions to start.

‘You’re a long way from home, love. Whereabouts in Birmingham are you from?’ they ask.

Wendy smiles patiently, then explains that, actually, she’s a pure-blood Yorkshire woman, albeit having lived down south for the past 36 years.

Three decades spent in Kent and more recently in Sussex may have softened her vowels, but she’s never lived anywhere near the West Midlands in her life.

But for Wendy, 57, being mistaken for a Brummie represents progress. Ten years ago, she spent 18 months with a broad, French accent - sounding ‘like something from Allo Allo’ - after suffering a minor stroke.

Since then, bizarrely, her accent has evolved during her long recovery and passed through several different hues, resulting in her being mistaken for a wide variety of nationalities.

‘I’ve been asked what region of Ireland I’m from, and more recently where in the West Midlands. I’m yet to be asked whereabouts in Yorkshire I’m from. That will be a good day for me,’ she says.

Wendy, an award-winning special needs teacher, now living in Bexhill-on-Sea, in East Sussex, suffers from Foreign Accent Syndrome, a very rare but recognised medical condition in which, due to a stroke or brain injury, a person starts speaking in a different accent.

The syndrome was first discovered in Norway in 1941 when a young woman who’d been injured in a bombing raid woke up speaking with a German accent.

Since then, there have been only 60 recorded cases worldwide.



Last week, IT project manager Sarah Colwill was featured in the Mail after an excruciating migraine attack last month left her with a Chinese accent.

The 35-year-old, who lives in Plymouth, suffered an acute hemiplegic migraine, which causes the blood vessels in the brain to expand, resulting in stroke-like symptoms.



‘I just want my own voice back, but I don’t know if I ever will,’ said Mrs Colwill last week.

‘I spoke to my stepdaughter on the phone from hospital and she didn’t recognise me.

‘Since then I’ve had my friends hanging up on me because they think I’m a hoax caller.’

She is now having speech therapy to try to revert to her Devon accent.



Foreign Accent Syndrome: Sarah Colwill, left, speaks with a Chinese accent; Wendy Hasnip, right, from Yorkshire, spent 18 months with a French accent

The most fascinating question her story posed was just how long these extraordinary symptoms last.

As I discovered this week in talking to Wendy Hasnip and others who suffered the same symptoms some time ago, the answer is that they can continue for many years.

Other noted cases have included Linda Walker, a Geordie who woke up after a stroke with a distinct Jamaican accent in 2006, and Scot Tom Paterson, who earlier this year woke from a coma, after a car crash, speaking like a Pole.

Professor Sophie Scott, from University College London’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, says: ‘Speech is very important for humans, and a lot of different parts of the brain are used, as well as what we call the articulator parts of the body such as the tongue, jaw and voice box.

‘Where something relatively minor has happened to the brain and a patient hasn’t totally lost their power of speech, they find themselves in a position where they know the words they want to say, but cannot coordinate their tongue, mouth, lips and voice box to formulate the words.

‘Typical traits include substituting “d” for “t” and adding an extra syllable at the end of words, similar to how a foreigner would speak when attempting English.

‘A native English speaker will immediately interpret these differences as a foreign accent — it is a natural reaction for us to try to “place” someone.

‘Interestingly, when recordings of these sufferers’ speech is played to foreigners, they do not hear a foreign accent, just someone speaking with difficulty.’

WHO KNEW? Of the 61 reported cases of Foreign Accent Syndrome worldwide, 58 were due to a stroke or head injury, and one linked to a migraine

So much for the theory, but how does it affect people in everyday life?

Wendy admits she was terrified when her voice started to bend out of recognisable shape, literally syllable by syllable, one afternoon over coffee in November 1999.

She’d suffered a minor stroke a couple of weeks previously while at work, at the Watergate School in Lewisham, South London.

‘I started to feel really unwell - totally drained and exhausted,’ she says.

‘I lost my speech and I couldn’t walk properly. After two weeks in hospital, Wendy was discharged.

‘As a divorced mum to six boys, then aged between ten and 18, I knew I had to get home and “get on with it”. My speech was quite slurred at first, but gradually started to return, as did my mobility.

Then one day, a couple of weeks later, I was having coffee with my mother Freda, who lived a few doors away in Otford, near Sevenoaks, where I lived at the time, when I noticed my voice starting to speed up. Then I detected a slight accent, which sounded French.’

Wendy is unsure whether she’d suffered another stroke at this point, or if this was a sign of her speech patterns evolving as her brain began its recovery and compensation process.

‘I’d only ever spent a weekend in France, so I had no idea why this was happening to me. I was powerless to stop it. It was a very strange sensation.

‘My intonation and sentence structure were muddled and confused, like a foreign national struggling with English. I was using a different vocabulary, calling things “bizarre” — a word I don’t normally use.’

Assuming it was part of her recovery process, Wendy didn’t go back to hospital but determined to carry on as normal.



A few days later - and by now speaking with a heavy French accent - she was escorting her mother to a hospital appointment when she explained her strange-sounding voice to volunteers in the hospital shop.

‘One said she’d heard of this condition called Foreign Accent Syndrome and offered to look it up on the internet for me.’

New voice: Scottish Tom Paterson developed an Ayrshire accent after waking up from a six-week coma

It was here Wendy learned of the work of two Oxford University researchers, cognitive neuropsychologist Dr Jennifer Gurd and phonetician Dr John Coleman, whose studies into the phenomenon were published in 2002. She happily offered herself as one of their guinea pigs and underwent various tests and brain scans at Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital.



The researchers identified tiny areas of damage in various parts of volunteers’ brains, which, they suggested, could bring about subtle changes in vocal features, which were interpreted by listeners as a foreign accent.



Wendy was hugely relieved: ‘Once I had a diagnosis, and some sort of explanation, the fear factor was removed. I was reassured that my accent would probably return to normal eventually.’

The French accent did fade after about 18 months, but today there is a definite West Midlands twang.

Wendy says that although it would be nice to get her ‘real’ voice back, she is relieved to have escaped relatively unscathed.



Yorkshire native Chris Gregory had a similar experience of suddenly having a different accent two years ago when he awoke from a coma speaking with a broad Irish brogue.

The 32-year-old from Sheffield spoke (and sang) like a native Dubliner and treated staff at Sheffield’s Royal Hallamshire Hospital to a word-perfect rendition of Danny Boy as they brought him round following brain surgery.



Chris - who’s now back at work as a landscape gardener - cannot remember a thing about the incident and has to take his wife Mary’s word for what happened.

Geordie Linda Walker woke up after a stroke with a Jamaican accent

‘I’ve told Mary that she should have videoed me. I don’t even know the words to Danny Boy.’

Chris was in hospital in December 2007 having tests on a benign, egg-sized tumour which had been discovered in the right side of his brain three years earlier.

His medical team had decided that, although operable, it was safer to leave the tumour where it was, but booked in Chris for regular scans to monitor it.

At one of these routine appointments, Chris and Mary - who was then his fiancée - were told the tumour had grown and a biopsy was arranged.

It was during this procedure that surgeons accidentally severed a blood vessel, causing bleeding in Chris’s brain and leaving him delirious and in terrible pain.

From this point on, Chris relies on Mary to recall what happened.

She says: ‘Once the bleeding was identified, surgeons operated to remove a 50p-size piece of Chris’s skull to relieve the pressure on his brain. He was then put in a drug-induced coma for two days to give his brain time to rest.’

The day his medical team woke him up, Mary, 37, recalls walking into the ward hearing someone singing Danny Boy at the top of his voice.

‘It sounded like a drunken Irishman and seemed to be coming from the direction of Chris’s bed.

I thought it couldn’t possibly be him, but when I pulled back the curtains, Chris was sitting up, belting out the tune with all the right words, and in a broad Irish accent.

‘From that point, Chris kept referring to me as “da broid” whenever I walked in the room.

‘His accent was absolutely perfect, but he had no connection with the country.’

Mary says she was too relieved that Chris was alive to be worried.



The next morning, Chris’s accent was back to broad Sheffield and he had no memory of his performance.

He spent another week in hospital and was back at work, fully fit, in April. Specialists linked the incident to Foreign Accent Syndrome and concluded that parts of Chris’s brain had been temporarily disabled by the pressure of the blood clot, distorting his pronunciation and word formation.

Subsequent brain scans have shown no further change in the tumour. The couple married, as planned, in November 2008, at a hotel in Sheffield.

‘We joked afterwards that we should visit Ireland, but so far we still haven’t,’ says Mary.

'I had to learn to talk again from scratch. I was taught how to shape my mouth, and where to put my tongue to form sounds, and I practised with my wife Amy every night '

‘Looking back, it did have its funny moments, but I’m still so glad we got the old Chris back.’



While he escaped relatively unscathed, the same cannot be said for Richard Murray, a born-and-bred Brummie who is still mistaken for a Welshman five years following a devastating stroke days after returning from his honeymoon in 2005.

‘Since that day, he has spoken with various accents, starting with Italian, passing through French and Polish, and then arriving back in the UK, somewhere between Birmingham and Cardiff.

‘Chatting to people out and about in the town inevitably used to lead to the question: “How long have you lived here, then?”’ says Richard, 34, a sales development manager, now living in Hereford.

‘Nowadays, people tend to think I am Welsh, which doesn’t prompt so many questions. I really don’t mind what nationality they think I am, I’m still so grateful to be understood at all.’

Doctors believe Richard’s stroke was caused by a blood clot travelling to his brain from his big toe, which he’d broken on honeymoon in Mauritius nine days earlier then probably exacerbated during the 13-hour flight home.

Nine days later, he collapsed. ‘I was in the kitchen and simply dropped to the floor.

‘The right side of my body was paralysed and I was totally unable to speak.’ Terrified, he was transferred to Cardiff Hospital’s special neurological unit, where he was treated with drugs to break down the clot lodged in the left side of his brain - the area controlling the mechanics of speech.

‘I still had the vocabulary and I could remember how words were supposed to sound - I just couldn’t make my mouth and tongue make those sounds; all that came out were grunts. It was incredibly frustrating.’

A week later, Richard was discharged from hospital, by which time he had full use of his arms and legs, but was still mute.

The wait for an NHS speech therapy was several months, but luckily his friend Sue Whitefoot, a qualified speech therapist, agreed to help him free of charge.

‘I had to learn to talk again from scratch. I was taught how to shape my mouth, and where to put my tongue to form sounds, and I practised with my wife Amy every night in front of a mirror.’

Within two weeks, Richard had learned four basic words: ‘hi’, ‘bye’, ‘yes’ and ‘no’. The minute he’d mastered them, his new accent was apparent.

‘Initially, I sounded Italian, but then turned more French.

‘Once, in the supermarket the checkout assistant asked me a question which I couldn’t answer, having used up my four stock words, and all I could do was shrug. I heard someone in the queue behind me mutter: “Bloody foreigner, why don’t you learn English?”’

With Sue and Amy’s tireless support, Richard was able to return to his old job as a financial planning manager six months later.

‘I warned clients at the outset that my accent had changed, and was continually changing, so they would know it was me when I called, not an Italian or Frenchman masquerading as me.’

Four years on, Richard is now father to Olivia, three, and two-year-old Finlay, and says he’s finally at a point where speech is coming naturally. ‘The French accent has gone, for now. It could come back. It would be nice to have my old Birmingham accent back, but I am happy simply being able to talk — even if everyone’s convinced I’m a Welshman.’