Never lived down East but stroke leaves woman with Newfoundland accent: experts

Following her stroke in 2006, Rose Dore checked herself into a Hamilton, Ont., hospital where staff assumed she was from the East Coast based on the way she spoke.

It wasn't until her family arrived that health-care workers realized they had a special case on their hands. Staff contacted speech specialists who mapped Dore's language patterns and concluded she was experiencing foreign-accent syndrome.

A new report, published in the July issue of the Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences, found that although the 52-year-old woman's accent isn't identical to that of a Newfoundlander there are striking similarities.

"Instead of saying 'that' and 'this' she was saying 'dat' and 'diss' at least some of the time. So the 'ths' were turning into 'ds' and 'ts' and her vowels were really changing so they were getting really elongated," said principle investigator Karin Humphreys of McMaster University.

"She was saying things like 'doog' (instead of dog)."

Researchers took recordings of Dore's speech and matched them with known features of a Newfoundlander's accent.

It was a "pretty good match," said Alexandre Sevigny, one of the study's co-authors.

In St. John's, an Ontario woman with a Newfoundlander's accent proved a novel talking point.

"There is no one Newfoundland accent," opined talkshow host Linda Swain.

"So it's kind of interesting to see that for some reason, the folks at McMaster University in Hamilton, who've been studying her case, consider this somehow to be a Newfoundland accent."

One caller joked that "Newfoundlanders don't have an accent. It's all the people on the mainland who have an accent."

Meanwhile, after hearing a recording of Dore's voice, others said she sounded familiar.

"You can sense it, but not fully," said Ryan Angel, 20, as he listened while enjoying a cup coffee.

"She sounds like she's from St. John's, but not out around the bay... (the accent's) not strong enough."

In an interview published Wednesday, Dore, who deals with paralysis from her stroke and now lives in Windsor, Ont., said she feels lucky, regardless of her new accent.

Dore wasn't immediately available for comment Thursday.

Considering the sometimes catastrophic affects of strokes, including complete loss of speech, Humphreys said Dore's new accent "is actually a very good outcome language-wise."

"Her speech sounds completely normal. Nobody thinks that she sounds disordered at all, like she's had a stroke," she said. "It just sounds a bit different."

There are 50,000 strokes in Canada every year, with Dore's case the first confirmed case of foreign-accent syndrome in this country, Sevigny said.

There are only 20 other known cases confirmed by brain scans worldwide, most notably one where a woman in the United Kingdom woke up with a Jamaican accent, he added.

Whether Dore's Newfoundland accent is permanent is anyone's guess.

"Time will tell," Sevigny said. "Sometimes it fades through (speech) rehabilitation, and sometimes it doesn't."

- with files from Tara Brautigam in St. John's