American Woman Wakes Up With A British Accent Due To Rare Disease

An American woman who lives in Arizona fell asleep with a terrible headache. When she woke up, she speaks an entirely different accent – British.

Michelle Myers, a former beauty queen, suffers from a rare disease called Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS).

Myers also had experienced having different accents in the past.

In all these instances, she slept with a headache and woke up speaking different accents – Irish and Australian. However, her accent lasted for only a week.

However, on her third attack, her British accent lingered for two years.

Until today, her American accent has not yet returned. Other people made fun of her accent.

Michelle Myers said:

“Everybody only sees or hears Mary Poppins.”

Ironically, Michelle never left the United States and was shocked to wake up with another accent.

She’s not faking it and she’s not crazy. Her condition, the Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS), typically occurs after strokes, neurological damage, traumatic brain injuries and other underlying health issues wherein there is damage to the language center of the brain. When this happens, the patient’s native language would sound like it is tinged with a foreign accent.

When Michelle was a little girl, she always complained that her bones hurt. She had been in and out of the hospital with a condition called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a disease that leads to easy bruising, painful joints and blood vessel rupture.

The doctors also linked her condition to her hemiplegic migraine.

This condition produces symptoms same as in stroke.

Michelle added:

“It’s actually quite dangerous. It looks just like a stroke, but it’s not a stroke. They don’t know how or what triggers it.”

FAS is a very rare condition. It was first documented in 1907 when a Parisian man who had a stroke spoke an Alsatian accent. The man did not live in the area where the language is spoken. Over the next century since the condition’s discovery, only 60 known cases were documented based on a 2011 study.

Listen to Michelle Myers’ British accent below: