After being involved in a very serious car crash, Leanne Rowe was left with what sounds like a French accent, but doctors say Leanne’s French sounding accent is just a coincidence.
Imagine waking up after a horrific accident only to find out you sounded French. Scary, isn’t it? That’s exactly what happened to a Tasmanian native called Leanne Rowe after she broke her jaw and back in a car crash eight years ago. The condition has had a serious affect on Leanne’s life and has caused her to develop anxiety and depression.
“It makes me so mad because I am Australian,” said Rowe, whose family doctor Robert Newton believes she has the extremely rare condition known as foreign accent syndrome (FAS). “I am not French, [though] I do not have anything against the French people.”
However, scientists believe that the accent is pure coincidence and we actually associate the sound with a French accent because it closely resembles one.
The University of Sydney’s Karen Croot has previously researched Foreign Accent Syndrome and says, “It’s just an accident of chance that happens to that person that what happens to their speech happens to overlap with the features of a known accent.”
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