You wake up in the morning and after your first few sentences people say “How do you speak all of a sudden?” Or strangers want to know if you originate from Franconia, although you have never moved away from your northern German homeland. This or something similar could happen to people who suffer from the so-called foreign accent syndrome (FAS). Only early this year the case of a U.S. citizen went through the press, who suddenly found himself with an Irish accent after a cancer illness, without ever having been in Ireland.
In scientific literature, about 80 to 100 cases have been documented worldwide in which people affected suddenly appear to speak in a foreign accent and are themselves faced with a puzzle. Responsible are mainly neurological damage and apparently sometimes mental illness.
But don’t get your hopes up for language acquisition without laborious learning. FAS is really only about a changed way of speaking, which is then interpreted by the environment as a certain accent. Reports of people who suddenly speak foreign languages that they have never heard before (xenoglossia) rather belong to the parapsychological environment.