This (Real Player video) piece from the BBC is very interesting. Apparantly there is something called Foreign Accent Syndrome and a Newcastle woman suffers from it now after a stroke. It means that she has lost her Newcastle accent in favour of an accent which many people find hard to place but which has variously been identified as French-Canadian, Jamaican and East European.
What is noteworthy is the reaction of other people who don't believe her when she says she is from Newcastle and that her whole sense of identity seems to have been badly hit. In a related text article an even worse case is described of a Norwegian woman who acquired a German accent during the second World War and was ostracised by her community as a result.
I must say that the Geordie woman still sounds like a Geordie woman to me but I can hear Jamaican every so often. As a Brit I am used to the idea of regional accents helping or hindering in life but I have never considered how a change in accent can have such a drastic effect on the way people around you react.
Comments
Fascinating Anne, thanks for this. I'm not that surprised about her saying that "her whole sense of identity seems to have been badly hit"; I've got a very "unusual" accent (having grown up with an American accent aquired from my American father while growing up in Germany, which has been affected by living in the UK for nearly 20 years now). Having such a non-identifiable accent makes it difficult for people to pigeon-hole me, and it's something most people desperately want to do. It's very unusual for me to have a conversation with anyone for more than 5 minutes without them asking me where I'm from. I don't mind really, but it does highlight the fact that accents give away a great deal of information about us - geographical background, class background, education etc. People clearly heavily rely on this information and use it to build up a picture of you when speaking to you, and are puzzled and feel deprived when that information isn't available to them or, in the case of this stroke victim, is contradictory.
A note on the video - I couldn't access it from the link in your blog, I had to go to the BBC article itself (from the link in your second paragraph) from where I could access the video.
Eric
and wish to assit as far as possible.
Wish to assist as far as possible.