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Do_Better_Today t1_j685o94 wrote

Are they really speaking with an accent? Or is their speech just changed due to brain injury, and we associate that change with an accent that sounds similar?

It’s hard to believe someone could just sporadically start speaking in an accent from a place they never visited before.

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anonymoussarcasm t1_j699ry3 wrote

It has more to do with the phonetic positioning of the tongue when pronouncing vowels and consonants. Head trauma can effect the cranial nerves which control the mouth, throat and tongue. The different between accents in the same language is principally due to the positioning and manipulation of these structures. So it isn't that they develop an authentic foreign accent, more that they misalign their speech producing anatomy and the misalignment produces an effect which is heard as foreign to the listener.

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