The effects of a head injury can be far-reaching, but one of the rarest is ‘foreign accent syndrome’ with only 60 recorded cases world-wide.
Sharon Campbell- Rayment recently joined this group, as she began speaking with a Scottish accent after falling from a horse and sustaining a head injury.
The 50-year-old, from Ontario, Canada, has never even visited Scotland, but is now even speaking with some of the national dialect, including words such as ‘wee’ and ‘grand’.
Doctors have informed Mrs Campbell-Rayment that her accent may fade in time or she may speak with a Scottish accent for the rest of her life.
Accents such as these seem to be entirely random: “I could have ended up with any accent – French, Spanish, even Klingon – but I got Scottish” said Mrs Campbell-Rayment.
The most unusual case so far recorded was a woman in the West Country who began speaking with a Chinese accent following a severe migraine.
