Stroke gives woman British accent. This is a weird story about a syndrome I had never heard of until now.
This is despite the fact that Tiffany Roberts, 61, has never been to Britain. Her accent is a mixture of English cockney and West Country.
Doctors say Mrs Roberts, who was born and bred in Indiana, has a condition called foreign accent syndrome.
The origin of accents has always fascinated me, especially since I studied in the U.K. for a while in college and was introduced to the wild variety of distinct British accents that exist within a just a few miles of each other. I’ve always assumed that derived accents, such as American or Australian from the British common tongue, were a natural progression of language and inflection over time and distance. The assumption then was that accents were strictly an environmental artifact. According to this article and the cockney accent that the Indiana-born woman now sports, they are not, although part of me thinks this is one fantastic hoax.
