Headache led to new accent like Mary Poppins

UNITED STATES: Michelle Myers’ accent is global, but she has never left the country.

The Arizona woman says she has gone to bed with extreme headaches in the past, and woken up speaking with what sounds like a foreign accent.

At various points, Australian and Irish accents have inexplicably flowed from her mouth for about two weeks, then disappeared, Myers says.

But a British accent has lingered for two years, the 45-yearold Arizona woman told ABC affiliate KNXV.

And one particular person seems to come to mind when she speaks. ‘‘Everybody only sees or hears Mary Poppins,’’ Myers told the station.

Myers says she has been diagnosed with Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS).

The disorder typically occurs after strokes or traumatic brain injuries damage the language centre of a person’s brain – to the degree that their native language sounds like it is tinged with a foreign accent, according to the Centre for Communication Disorders at the University of Texas at Dallas.

In some instances, speakers warp the typical rhythm of their language and the stress of certain syllables. Affected people may also cut out articles such as ‘‘the’’ and drop letters, turning an American ‘‘yeah’ into a Scandinavian ‘‘yah’’, for instance.

Shelia Blumstein, a Brown University linguist who has written extensively on FAS, said sufferers typically produced grammatically correct language, unlike many stroke or brain injury victims.

She spoke to The Washington Post for a 2010 story about a Virginia woman who fell down a stairwell, rattled her brain and awoke speaking with a Russianlike accent. The injury caused her brain to truncate pronunciations for ‘‘this’’ and ‘‘that’’, resulting in foreign-sounding ‘‘dis’’ and ‘‘dat’’.

The condition was first documented in 1907, when French neurologist Pierre Marie studied a Parisian man who suffered a stroke and suddenly spoke with an Alsatian accent, though he was not from the Germany-France border region where the language is spoken. Over the next century, only about 60 cases were documented in literature, the US National Institutes of Health said in a 2011 study.

Cases have spanned the world, from a Louisiana woman who suddenly spoke with a Cajun accent after a brain injury to a Japanese stroke patient who sounded Korean.

Myers told British tabloid The Sun that she found her condition ‘‘really difficult to begin with ... people would think it was a joke, saying things like, ‘You sound like a Spice Girl’. It was hard, because I was really struggling. I have come to terms with the fact I might sound like this forever. I realise it’s part of me now’’.