In Katori Hall’s WHADDABLOODCLOT!!!, our final production of the season, wealthy socialite Eden Higgenbotham suffers from a stroke…and wakes up with a Jamaican accent. The cause? Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS), a real-world disorder that causes those who suffer from it to appear to speak with a foreign accent that they cannot change or control. While Hall’s play depicts the disorder with biting humor, it doesn’t hestitate to make clear that, when you have FAS, you end up losing more than control over your voice. Here’s WTF’s primer on causes of, cases of, and misconceptions about one of the world’s strangest neurological disorders.

WHEN YOU HAVE FAS, HERE’S…

What DOES NOT Happen

> You do not acquire a foreign accent. Let me explain. When we hear someone with FAS speak, we hear something that sounds, to us, like a foreign accent. But the brain trauma that causes FAS doesn’t drag an accent out of a victim’s memory and force them to speak with it, or cause them to misremember what accent they grew up speaking, or anything even remotely like that. Instead, it damages the brain’s language centers, causing subtle shifts in the sufferer’s speech that have nothing to do with their memory or experience of any accent, and then people who hear the victim’s voice perceive the change in speech as the presence of an accent.

This explains why many FAS sufferers have “hybrid accents” (like a woman in WHADDABLOODCLOT!!! whose accents sounds “British/Hungarian”) and how some sufferers can develop “accents” that they’ve never had much contact with before, like the Australian woman who developed a Chinese-sounding accent, even though she’s never been to China. She’s not actually speaking with a Chinese accent at all – she’s speaking with changes in her speech that we perceive as a Chinese accent.

> You do not magically learn the language that you now have the “accent” for. If I were to wake up with FAS and suddenly sound Russian, I’d still be able to speak English, but I wouldn’t be able to speak Russian any better than I can now.

* To be fair, there are a couple of really cool stories of people waking up from brain trauma  and suddenly being fluent in German or knowing perfect English even though they’ve never spoken it before – they just have little to no hard science to back them up. So enjoy them, but don’t take them seriously.

>You do not become a different person. FAS causes no other neurological or psychological changes in those who develop it, although many FAS victims do suffer from depression and the feeling that they’ve lost parts of their identities.

What DOES Happen

> You hurt your brain. The lion’s share of FAS cases are caused by brain trauma, usually from a stroke or a severe migraine or migraine condition – this woman actually went to sleep because of a migraine and woke up with a French “accent”. A couple more have been linked to the nerve disorder multiple sclerosis and to other developmental problems. There are a couple of fluke cases that seem to have little do with brain damage, but generally, you need to mess up your brain pretty badly to be at risk for FAS.

> Your brain’s language centers get…confused. Due to the trauma inflicted by the stroke/injury/etc. etc., a part of the brain that is responsible for a certain linguistic function is damaged and starts doing its job differently than it ever has before. For example, the part of the brain that controls how much a person with a British accent rounds her lips might be damaged, and suddenly, when she pronounce words like “small” or “fall”, her lips won’t round as much, and she will sound like she’s from the American South. Or the part that controls a California man’s use of the letter ‘r’ in everyday speech will stop working properly, and the lack of ‘r’ in that man’s speech will cause any stranger who talks to him to assume that he’s from Boston.

Often, only one element of speech is drastically changed in an FAS victim’s speech – that British woman with the Southern drawl is still going to articulate all her consonants in a British way, and she’s not gonna start saying “y’all” soon or anything like that – but the change is drastic enough that it sounds like the person’s entire accent has changed.

 Other Notable Cases

> One of the first recorded cases of FAS involved a young Norwegian woman, known as Astrid L., who developed a strong German accent after a piece of shrapnel hit her in the head during an air-raid. As if that wasn’t bad enough, this happened in 1941, right in the heart of WWII, and Astrid was ostracized from her community because her new accent sounded like that of the German enemy.

> In 2006, Linda Walker, 60, of Newcastle, England, woke up in a hospital from a stroke, and has since lived with an accent that many have labeled as both Jamaican and Eastern European.

> You can hear the change in an anonymous Texan woman’s voice due to FAS on this webpage from the University of Texas at Dallas.

So the next time you hear someone speaking with a crazy accent, whether you’re in the WHADDABLOODCLOT!!! audience or walking down the street, remember that people don’t always come by their accents willingly. And if someone tells you they’re from Hawaii even though it sounds like they’re from Slovakia, don’t be so quick to judge  – for all you know, they could be telling the truth.

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WHADDABLOODCLOT!!! runs on the Nikos stage from August 8-19 – for tickets and more information, click here.