I have just been informed of something out there that is waiting to strike me down. Along with global warming, snakehead fish, killer bees, the IRS, and Donald Trump, I now fear FOREIGN ACCENT SYNDROME. According to the Today Show, Karen Butler, a woman from Oregon (Oregon, for god’s sake) went in for routine oral surgery and came out with a heavy Irish accent. Now, when people ask her where she is from (people from Oregon are nosy, like that) and she says “Oregon,”they think she is saying “Ireland.”
Foreign Accent Syndrome is triggered by a stroke that can occur under sedation. It can strike at any time, anywhere. It places no value on one’s educational level or inherent goodness. It doesn’t spare grandmothers. Even short, defenseless grandmothers.
I am now terrified to go under sedation. I spent well over a year getting rid of my Philly accent. I practiced saying RAY-dee-ay-tor instead of RAH-dee-ay-tor, bagel instead of beggle, dog instead of dawg, library instead of liberry, “I’m going to get coffee at the mall” instead of “I’m gonna get cawfee at the mawl.” Most important, I learned to say “Our team is the Eagles” instead of “Are team is the Iggles.”
After countless hours of practice, I had achieved a vague, not-quite-identifiable Northeast Coast Accent. I liked to keep people guessing. But some things die hard. When John Kerry ran for President, I literally couldn’t pronounce his name. Now Husband Dan went wild. He kept yelling, “The Democratic Presidential candidate is NOT an Indian food product!” The best I could do after awhile was to say “Keh-Ree” very very slowly. And then, Kerry went and lost. All my work down the drain.
I know me. If I did get Foreign Accent Syndrome, I wouldn’t come out with an accent that was high class English. I’d get Cockney. And it wouldn’t be French. It would be Northern Jersey. Or Pennsylvania Dutch. Or Doolbung. Or an accent from one of my previous lives, like being a fishmonger in Dublin.
To make matters even worse,the Today Show then said that strokes like this can also cause people to no longer recognize faces, even of their spouses or children. So I would have some awful accent and I wouldn’t know who anyone was.
So yih can’t tawk, and yih can’t reccannize anyone. Vurry, vurry bad.
Life in the Boomer Lane 
TheIdiotSpeaketh
May 5, 2011
I’m from Oregon originally and I laughed my head off at this. I have a Texas drawl now after 21 years here, but my wife (a Texan) always made fun of the fact that as an Oregonian…I had no accent whatsoever…… she said our area of the country was dull because we had no accent to ridicule…… our only distinguishing feature was our love of using the word “Dude” after every 3rd word we spoke….. 🙂
lifeintheboomerlane
May 5, 2011
That is seriously funny. I was surprised that the natural voice of the woman did have an accent, a sort of general blue collar thing. Does that make sense?
writerwoman61
May 5, 2011
I have successfully lost my central Ohio accent…however, after talking to someone from there, it always comes back for a while…
Funny post, Renée!
Wendy
lifeintheboomerlane
May 5, 2011
Thanks, Wendy. Yes, accents definitely have a way of creeping up on us. We must remain ever-vigilent.
Cindy Eve
May 5, 2011
hahahaha! delightful. as a South African living in London my accent sometimes gets me into sticky situations & blow me down if I can understand the accents from up North or Essex. A Scottish accent gets me in a twist and the speaker usually has to repeat themselves 5 times over!
and I don’t even have the excuse of sedation!
thanks for a giggle.
Cindy
@notjustagranny
lifeintheboomerlane
May 5, 2011
Thanks for visiting Life in the Boomer Lane, Cindy. Scottish is, indeed, a mystery. I love the “blow me down” phrase.
lexy3587
May 5, 2011
Haha… it would be such a great conversation topic, though! You’d have so many more in-depth random-stranger-conversations, and your check-out-line chit-chat would never be dull 🙂
My mum still gets a Southern accent when she’s really angry or tired, and she hasn’t lived in South Carolina since she was 8. I’d be curious to see if she’d still get it, through a cockney foreign accent syndrom
lifeintheboomerlane
May 5, 2011
Thanks for visiting Life in the Boomer Lane, Lexy. True, accents do start others talking. Although I spoke to a woman from elsewhere who married an American and she was telling me some of the hilarious questions people always ask her, like “Is that an accent?” My toddler grandson was born in London and some of his words now have an English accent. Will be fun to see how long ke keeps the accent once they move back.
Lisa
May 5, 2011
LOL. I tend to slip into accents easily anyway, especially if I am talking to someone from Ireland. It’s such a musical accent I can’t help it. And of course, I drop all my ah’s wicked easily if I evah have too much to drink (the joys of growing up neah Bahston.
I think it might be fun to have an excuse for a new accent. Of course, I don’t really want to forget everyone I know (except a select few faces that I would like to forget).
Fun post.
lifeintheboomerlane
May 5, 2011
Thanks, Lisa. It’s fascinating how certain accents have some characteristics of others. I know I hear tiny bits of the British accent in some southern accents.
carldagostino
May 5, 2011
Nothing worse than an Italian who has learned English in Brooklyn , New York. Or anyone born there either. Youse unnerstands whas I’m sayin ?
lifeintheboomerlane
May 5, 2011
Yeah, New Yawkers are sumpin.
Elly Lou
May 5, 2011
Oye! Yous trashin’ my Jersey accent? Are yous?
I want to wake up with the same accent as that Indian guy from Short Circuit that says “wouldn’t you like to be a pepper, too?”
lifeintheboomerlane
May 5, 2011
I love Joisey! It’s so, uh, unique. I’m not familiar with the Indian guy. But I love the guy in the the commerical for Jamaican rum. Anyting Jamaican. Yoh mon.
judithhb
May 5, 2011
And when I was visiting my sister in California we went into a restaurant for lunch. The lovely, very chatty middle aged waitress asked Christine, my sister where she was from and how long she was staying and visiting her sister. And me the sister from New Zealand whom I must admit is a bit of a chameleon. I have lived several places and obviously pick up the accent.
Also here I must take umbrage about the cockney accent. There’s nothing wrong with it. Some of my best friends used to have one.
lifeintheboomerlane
May 5, 2011
“Used to.” A ha! Although Michael Caine was hot. Funny about your sister. Also funny how I totally can’t tell a NZ accent from an Aussie from parts of England. Duh.
Mrs. H.
May 5, 2011
Oh man! I watched that segment this morning and it TOTALLY freaked me out, too!! But, wanna know a deep dark secret about strokes? They can happen any time to any one and have any number of results, with or without anesthesia. So…uhm…that probably doesn’t make you feel any better. Sorry about that…let’s just move on, shall we?
Anyway. What I thought particularly crazy about the entire condition is that just as suddenly as it can strike, it can also disappear. It leads me to wonder about how hard-wired our brains are versus how adaptable they are. Do we all actually have the potential for any and all accent, then? Is it nature that causes us to speak a particular way or the way we are nurtured?
I grew up in Atlanta. And I am dead-set and determined that I am NOT from the South. I am from Atlanta. There’s a distinct difference. I do not listen to country music. I am so not conservative in speech or beliefs. I do not revel in hunting or driving big, loud trucks. I do not speak with a Southern drawl (or any accent, apparently–this according to the Brits I’ve encountered…they’re experts because they’re from where the language comes from ;)). I pay close attention to the way I enunciate and do allow “y’all” to slip through my lips. (It’s just easier to communicate with my neighbors that way, lol.) What’s funny, though, is that I am constantly asked by Southerners where I’m from. When I tell them I’m from Atlanta, I tend to get stunned silence in response. Speech be crazy.
Lisa
May 5, 2011
I am going to argue for nurture, and here is why. When I lived in Japan and was learning Japanese one of the discussions that often happened surrounded the names for animal sounds. For example, in a English a dog says “Woof” in Japanese a dog says “Wan wan!” An American frog says “ribbit”, I Japanese frog says “kerro kerro”. So how does this relate to accents and nurture. When you hear a dog bark in Japan it does not sound like “Woof Woof!” I sounds like “Wan wan!” Seriously! So all I can think is that somehow dogs have interpreted the correct accent from their human counterparts, or their human counterparts have learned the correct accent from their dogs. Nature? Nurture? I vote nurture.
lifeintheboomerlane
May 5, 2011
This is fascinating. Very recently I watched a docu about reasearch being done now on language acquisition in babies. They had both American women and Japanese women doing baby talk to American newborns. The babies responded equally to both. Then within a couple months, there began to be differences. By 6 months, the babies only responded to English. They had learned that certain sounds were important to them and others weren’t.
I want to hear a Japanese dog say “Wan wan!”
Mrs. H.
May 6, 2011
How cool is that! Yeah, I agree. I’d like to hear a Japanese dog go “Wan wan!” That’s adorable. 🙂
Emily Jane
May 5, 2011
My husband was telling me about this on the way home from work today! I think it’s fascinating… and a cockney accent would be brilliant; you could talk in rhyming slang when you wanted a secret code language 🙂
lifeintheboomerlane
May 5, 2011
Oh, funny. Everything about language is fascinating. I had a close friend in grad school who majored in linguistics. He published a mystery, where a prof was killed and the murder was “solved” by the babies that were in the research program he was leading.
Lunar Euphoria
May 6, 2011
Accents – my favorite topic! I study them for a living and help people modify them.
We moved all over the country in my formative years so my own accent has been influenced by Appalachian English (“You-uns better queeeedit”), 1980s West Coast Valley Girl speak where every declarative statement has a rising intonation (“Like OhmyGawd? Are you for real?? Because that’s so like gnarly??”), Memphis African-American English (“She be workin all the time”), Wisconsin something or other (“Hey yous guys, let’s go watch gymnyastics”), and now the stuff they speak in Arkansas (“Everything is alraaaaaht”).
lifeintheboomerlane
May 6, 2011
Oh, I love that. Accents are wonderful, both regional and people who speak English as a second language. Sometimes I know exactly what makes an accent and accent. Other times, I can’t figure it out. It took me awhile to realize that the Vietnamese people I dealt with dropped the end of a lot of words. My manicurist worked at “Roy Naih” instead of Royal Nails. My dad (Eastern European) said “walentine” and “vy.” So he knew how to make the actual sounds , but try as he might, he couldn’t put them in the correct place.
pegoleg
May 6, 2011
I have Foreign Accent Mirroring Syndrome. Whenever I’m talking to someone with an accent, I start talking like them. I’m not mocking – I swear! It’s complimentary and unconscious, and reflects my jealousy that I have a flat, Midwestern no-accent.
lifeintheboomerlane
May 6, 2011
I’ve heard of others doing that. You might actually have a facility for language. Now Husband speaks multiple languages and he can do amazing renditions of all kinds of accents. Other people make everything sound like Chineese.
pegoleg
May 6, 2011
I do have a facility for accents. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean I have the brain or work ethic to actually learn hard stuff like a foreign language.
Although, when I went to Ireland 2 years ago, I spent weeks learning basic phrases in Irish. When I got there, I didn’t meet a single Irishman who spoke the language. Sigh.
merrilymarylee
May 6, 2011
Funny! She just had the accent. . . but not the ability to speak Irish (or Gaelic)?
I’ve never had Foreign Accent Syndrome, but when I had my hysterectomy they pumped so much air in my stomach that (as the Gas-X commercial says) I was flatulent in three languages for several days afterwards.
lifeintheboomerlane
May 6, 2011
I am totally laughing. In three languages.
Tori Nelson
May 6, 2011
I fake a Jersey accent in crowded places here. Scares away the locals as they assume all people from Jersey are affiliated with the Mob and other such sinful clubs. Talking that way forever would be substantially less funny 🙂
lifeintheboomerlane
May 6, 2011
At the risk of insulting Joisyites, uh, yes.
Georgette Sullins
May 6, 2011
Y’all just crack me up! And to think my first language was/is Spanish. Go figure.
lifeintheboomerlane
May 7, 2011
Thanks for visiting Life in the Boomer Lane, Georgette. So you went from Spanish to Southern?
georgettesullins
May 7, 2011
Yep! Spanish and French, the two languages that have influenced Southern speech are a logical transition to Southern…”How many do you lack (said like liiiiiike) -> ¿Cuántos te faltan?; savy -> sabe -> savez; I’m going to carry her to the market -> Voy a llevarla al mercado; Y’all -> Uds. (plural); My car up and died on me -> Se me descompuso el coche or worse “My cat up and died on me” -> Se me murió el gato. (I’m the victim, not the cat.); It’s making good weather today. -> Hace buen tiempo hoy. -> Il fait bon temps. ETC. Although these examples are not about accents, they do remind me why Southerners talk/speak the way they do. Nice post; I thoroughly enjoyed this and other posts…you’re on my blogroll.
lifeintheboomerlane
May 7, 2011
Thanks, Georgette. What a great comment. I’ve read it twice already. I’ll marshall what energy I have left and meander off to look at your blog right now.
Ellen5e
May 11, 2011
Yes Dear you do have quite the wit about you. If I may, I think it important to correct that the Foreign Accent Syndrome story and the story of not being able to recognize faces are two different cases. They involve different areas of the brain.
I also have FAS since May 12th, 2009 after a severe migraine followed by one-sided facial numbness. CTs and MRIs did not show a stroke or a tumor, but clearly something dramatic happened since I now went from Midwest farmer’s daughter (no real accent ) to heavy “Eastern European” .
It IS amazing really!! Scary to think that it can strike a person so “out of the blue”, but I am mostly amazed at how (as you have discussed) I could have aquired such an obviously foreign accent without having travelled to any of these countries.
I invite you to see the many postings I have as I have travelled this road with such a medically rare disorder. Not only does your best friend hang up the phone, but the newly assigned neurologists just assume you are a foreigner and ask “why are you here?” “Hello!! This is not my voice!”
Most of all I want to congratulate you for not jumping on the beat-up-the-weirdo bandwagon by writing hurtful statements like many blog and tweet comments who immediately assume foreign accent syndrome is some kind of sham. It is an oddity, that is certain, however, it is real and affects now 14 people that I know (I’ve gone looking to connect us for support and research purposes).
Whatever accent you have my dears, please continue to use your words to build other people up, help them think a little mire, laugh a little harder, and spread the joy of even having a voice with which to do it. Blessings your 1st real FAS friend, Ellen
lifeintheboomerlane
May 12, 2011
Thanks for visiting Life in the Boomer Lane, Ellen, and for your comments. Yes, I will certainly check out your blog.