The Daily BuzzMeet a woman diagnosed with ‘Foreign Accent Syndrome’
[Pereira is one of sixty people who suffer from the disease worldwide/YouTube]
Linda Pereira was at home, alone, when she felt a sudden strange feeling in her brain.
“My eyes and brain seemed to fuzz in and out,” the 50-year-old mother of three said.
Suddenly, she felt “a ball erupt”. She was instantly left speechless and motionless.
“When my husband came home, he thought I was just having a rest and it took him half-an-hour to finally realize I couldn’t answer him,” Pereira said.
The next day, Pereira’s husband noticed a change in her speech.
“My husband thought I sounded British and said sometimes he couldn’t understand me,” she said. “But I thought it was more Swedish or German.”
Two days later, normal accent didn’t return, she went to see a physiologist and neurologist. They diagnosed her with Foreign Accent Syndrome.
Pereira’s accent swings from Swedish to German to British to South African. She has uploaded several videos on YouTube, as a way to spread awareness about her condition which she says is “not at all well understood”.
