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This (Real Player video) piece from the BBC is very interesting. Apparantly there is something called Foreign Accent Syndrome and a Newcastle woman suffers from it now after a stroke. It means that she has lost her Newcastle accent in favour of an accent which many people find hard to place but which has variously been identified as French-Canadian, Jamaican and East European.
What is noteworthy is the reaction of other people who don't believe her when she says she is from Newcastle and that her whole sense of identity seems to have been badly hit. In a related text article