Damage can change your accent Roger Harris/Science Photo Library

“I’ve become resigned to speaking like this,” he says. The 17-year old boy’s mother tongue is Dutch, but for his whole life he has spoken with what sounds like a French accent.

“This is who I am and it’s part of my personality,” says the boy, who lives in Belgium – where Dutch is an official language – and prefers to remain anonymous. “It has made me stand out as a person.”

No matter how hard he tries, his speech sounds French. About 140 cases of foreign accent syndrome (FAS) have been described in scientific studies, but most of these people developed the condition after having a stroke.


In the UK, for example, a woman in Newcastle who’d had a stroke in 2006 woke up with a Jamaican accent. Other British cases include a woman who developed a Chinese accent, and another who acquired a pronounced French-like accent overnight following a bout of cerebral vasculitis.

But the teenager has had the condition from birth, sparking the interest of Jo Verhoeven of City University London and his team.

Scans revealed that, compared with controls, the flow of blood to two parts of the boy’s brain were significantly reduced. One of these was the prefrontal cortex of the left hemisphere – a finding unsurprising to the team, as it is known to be associated with planning actions including speech.

But the other region – the right side of the cerebellum – was unexpected. This part of the brain is known to be associated with coordinating actions, but was thought to be a more primitive region than the cortex.

“Our results add to evidence that the cerebellum doesn’t just coordinate movement, but is also involved in the cognitive planning of an activity,” says Verhoeven.

The French way

Speech analysis confirmed that the teenager has several typically French inflections. Most distinctively, he pronounces the letter “r” the French way, using the uvular muscle at the back of the mouth, rather than the Dutch way of using the tip of the tongue. “I’ve tried very hard to change it to a Dutch ‘r’, but I’ve never managed it because I just can’t,” he says.

He also pronounces vowels differently, saying a French-sounding “ee” (as in “peace”) rather than the shorter Dutch “i” (as in “ink”).

Verhoeven points out these traits are not intentional. “All speakers with FAS have a speech impairment which happens to be interpreted as a foreign accent,” he says.

“What’s also interesting is that the patient has other symptoms that can be attributed to these [faulty] connections,” says Sheila Blumstein of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Cognitive tests revealed that the teenager struggles not only to plan speech, but also to plan how to draw objects. Otherwise, his scores were generally typical.

Journal reference: Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2016.00065

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