Leanne Rowe suffered from broken bones after a major road mishap. Her wounds and fractures healed over time, but there was something different with her - the Australian bus driver started talking with a French accent.
Rowe's accident happened eight years ago and until now, she cannot speak in her original accent. She is not French and because of her condition, the Tasmanian woman has been into voluntary seclusion, suffering from depression and anxiety.
According to doctors, Rowe has a rare condition known as Foreign Accent Syndrome or FAS.
"Speech may be altered in terms of timing, intonation, and tongue placement so that is perceived as sounding foreign. Speech remains highly intelligible and does not necessarily sound disordered," explained an FAS support group.
"FAS has been documented in cases around the world, including accent changes from Japanese to Korean, British-English to French, American-English to British English, and Spanish to Hungarian," the page of the advocacy group stated.
According to a report on ABC News Australia, Rowe is one of two Australians affected by the condition. In the last seven decades, there have been just 62 cases of FAS around the globe.
"It makes me so angry because I am Australian. I am not French, [though] I do not have anything against the French people," Rowe said in an interview with ABC News.
Dr. Robert Newton, the family doctor of Rowe has known her prior to the accident, related that he has seen how the condition has affected his patient's life.
"She had a normal, if you like, Australian accent for the whole time I knew her before that. She'd done French at school but she'd never been to France, didn't have any French friends at all. She turned up after having a nasty head injury eight years ago speaking with a French accent I couldn't believe my ears," Newton said.
Dr. Karen Croot from the University of Sydney and considered as an FAS expert explained that Rowe's condition is not a speech impairment but rather a problem with motor control.
"Speech is one of the most complicated things we do, and there are a lot of brain centers involved in coordinating a lot of moving parts. If one or more of them are damaged, that can affect the timing, melody and tension of their speech," Croot said in an interview with CNN.
The first reported case of foreign accent syndrome was in 1941 when a Norwegian woman had shrapnel injuries to the brain and recovered with a German accent. A more recent case was in 2010 when a British woman started speaking in a Chinese accent.
Doctors say that patients suffering from FAS need to practice how their mouth works when they speak but it may take a long while before they can regain their original accent.
Listen to how Rowe speaks, in the video below:
