Coma/Foreign Language

[Wispy68]

I briefly heard on the radio the other day, that another coma patient has woken up and is speaking in a foreign language (Italian in this mans case). How the devil does it happen? I really don't believe that a person who has never learned another language can suddenly wake up and speak in another language (as the radio reporter stated). I'm sure I didn't hear wrong!

[smudge]

Perhaps it was an early April Fools Day joke?

[landie]

Wasn't this in Turin?

[Loosehead]

Well sounds a bit like the guy that went to the doctors with a broken finger and asked the doctor if he would be able to play the piano once it's mended. Sure said the doc, great said the man, never could before!

[Wispy68]

Ha ha..very funny!! Now, does anyone out there actually know what I'm on about, or was it all a dream?!!!

[Wispy68]

Oh, I see. Thank you. I could have sworn that the reporter said 'language' rather than 'accent'. I really should listen properly in future!!

[IndieSinger]

There was a similar case (as In A Pickle says, it's quite common) where an American lady was in a coma and woke up talking "exactly like a cockney". But only to Americans - when she came over here on the day-time tellybox programmes and opened her mouth, everyone laughed. It just sounded like a very bad, generic English accent, which wandered all over the country.

[stevie21]

Whether or not some of these stories are urban myths or not, in ye olde days when I was a student, I read about an American who had some damage to a small part of her (I'm sure it was a woman) brain. When she regained consciousness, she spoke with an Irish accent.
I think this woman's father was Irish and she possibly had an Irish accent before spending the majority of her life in the USA but in this case, the accent at least existed before.

http://www.ox.ac.uk/blueprint/2002-03/3110/19.shtml
http://www.neuroanatomy.wisc.edu/selflearn/Britishaccent .htm

[moggyday]

 a bit like what the previous person has said it might be possible for someone who has woken from a coma to start speaking a language which had laid more or less dormant in the persons mind from early childhood, which they subsequently stopped speaking and had "forgotten". but knowlege of the tongue would have to be their already in some capacity nobody would just be able to speak a language they had no previous experience of just because they had been comatose