This website is designed to provide support to those seeking information about a rare speech disorder called Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS).
Foreign accent syndrome (FAS) is speech disorder that causes a sudden change to speech so that a native speaker is perceived to speak with a “foreign” accent. While rare, well over 100 cases have been reported in the medical literature. FAS can occur from brain damage, including stroke, traumatic injury, multiple sclerosis (MS), and vascular dementia. In other cases, FAS can occur as a type of functional neurological disorder (FND) in which speech is affected without clearly observable brain insult. One useful analogy is that the first type of FAS (neurogenic) results from brain “hardware” issues, and the second type (functional) from “software” problems. In addition, there are “mixed” cases in which individuals have both neurogenic and functional speech challenges.
Some patients describe onset or exacerbation of symptoms under conditions of emotional or psychological stress, although it remains controversial whether this is a key component of functional 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.
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”.
Some common speech changes associated with FAS include: