A woman was left “absolutely terrified” after waking up with a completely different accent.
Verity Went, from the Midlands, had never been to the North East, so imagine her shock when she woke up speaking with a Geordie accent. She confessed that people “laugh in her face” and dub her a “liar”, but there is a real, worrying reason for the change.
The 27-year-old Staffordshire woman says she didn’t recognise herself when she started speaking – and would even subconsciously adopt Geordie dialects like calling her mother ‘mam’ instead of ‘mum’. Verity was already suffering with terrible migraines – which left her “blacking out”, vomiting, having seizures, and partly paralysed.
“People just think I’m faking it, but I’m not. I didn’t ask for this to happen to me,” she told YouTube’s Truly TV.
In 2022, Verity was diagnosed with functional neurologic disorder (FND – the name given to ‘medically unexplained’ symptoms that appear to be caused by problems in the nervous system, but which are not caused by a physical neurological disease or disorder).
She was also diagnosed with foreign accent syndrome. The rare condition is common after a head injury, stroke, or other types of brain damage, according to Healthline.
Verity has become an internet sensation after sharing her remarkable story. In a TikTok video, she revealed: “Tell me something about yourself that nobody believes – I’ll go first. So this isn’t actually my original accent, it changed three months ago.”
She explained that she has functional neurological disorder, a condition where her brain and nervous system don’t connect properly. Verity added: “I had a really bad migraine and it [her speech] had gone from being slurred, a little bit, to how it is now.”
The video garnered hundreds of comments, with one person saying: “This wild! I’m from Newcastle and I genuinely thought you were from Newcastle too until I watched the full video.” Another commented: “You were a Geordie in your past life it seems.”
Someone else shared: “I have a friend with FND this happened too she developed a Chinese-sounding accent, she’s born and bred British. she gets the seizures etc too.”
Speaking to Truly TV, Verity discussed how her condition has affected her life: “It completely changed me as a person, it changed my life entirely. It affected my confidence massively because I can’t go anywhere independently.”
Her mum confessed that the unexpectedness of the situation led to both her and the doctor bursting into laughter, simply because they could not make sense of what was occurring. “If you look at me, it looks like there is nothing wrong with me,” Verity added. This has led to cruel trolls labelling her a “liar” and accusing her of fabricating the issue “for attention.”
In a recent TikTok video, Verity spoke out: “It’s been over seven months since my accent has changed and I feel like now that I am used to it, I notice how much it has changed me.
“The way I am, the way I respond to things, I have hardly any memories before […] It’s like something has switched in my brain and I’m a completely different person.”
Verity said her condition has left her constantly fatigued, sleeping a lot, and unable to work as at one point she suffered 13 seizures in a day. Thankfully, a brain surgeon is helping her comprehend her condition more and get any treatment or medication she needs.
Do you have a story? Get in touch at [email protected].