{"id":5037,"date":"2018-10-19T11:35:35","date_gmt":"2018-10-19T07:35:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/?p=5037"},"modified":"2018-10-19T11:35:35","modified_gmt":"2018-10-19T07:35:35","slug":"woman-wakes-up-unable-to-speak-english","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uaebarq.ae\/en\/2018\/10\/19\/woman-wakes-up-unable-to-speak-english\/","title":{"rendered":"Woman wakes up unable to speak English"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hannah Jenkins speaks English in the morning and German in the afternoon. It’s not a routine she chose to adopt – but something her brain requires her to do. It all started with a cycling accident.<\/p>\n

Her partner Andrew Wilde was halfway up a mountain in the US state of Montana when he received a baffling text from Hannah.<\/p>\n

He understood only two words – “dog” and “hospital” – but knew instinctively something was wrong.<\/p>\n

The text was in German, a language Hannah had grown up with, but Andrew didn’t really understand. They only ever communicated in English.<\/p>\n

Hannah had stayed at home in the UK, running the dog-training business she’d set up in Wokingham, Berkshire, while Andrew had gone to the US to train for an international shooting competition.<\/p>\n

He called Hannah’s mobile number, but got no response. With growing unease, he started to phone hospitals around Berkshire but couldn’t get any information. He knew he needed to get home.<\/p>\n

He made his way to the airport, unsure of what would be waiting for him when he returned.<\/p>\n

What he didn’t expect to find, was a different Hannah to the one he’d kissed goodbye days earlier.<\/p>\n

Hannah had been cycling through a park near their home the day before she sent the text to Andrew.<\/p>\n

She’d rounded a familiar corner and collided with another cyclist.<\/p>\n

She remembers little, but paramedics have since filled her in – the other cyclist saw her lying motionless and bleeding on the ground and called emergency services.<\/p>\n

He waited for help to arrive, told them he’d been cycling no faster than 32km\/h (20mph), then left, without giving any more information.<\/p>\n

An air ambulance was called for Hannah, who had been identified from items in her wallet.<\/p>\n

It was touch and go whether she would survive.<\/p>\n

Hannah eventually came to on a busy ward in the Royal Berkshire Hospital with no idea where she was, what had happened or why, in her mind, no-one spoke English.<\/p>\n

“I couldn’t understand anything,” she says. “I felt as though I’d woken up in a foreign country and I couldn’t understand why people weren’t speaking to me in a way that I could understand.”<\/p>\n

Doctors tended to her in this unfamiliar language. Finally she recognised what she thought was “name” and “date of birth” – and recited that to anyone who approached. It seemed like the right thing to do.<\/p>\n

The doctors were puzzled as Hannah’s documents all pointed to the fact she lived and worked in the UK. They knew she was called Hannah Jenkins, and yet she didn’t understand or respond to English.<\/p>\n

They contacted her next of kin, her sister Margaret, who asked to speak to Hannah.<\/p>\n

As Hannah sat in her hospital bed she chatted away on the phone, relieved that she was finally able to communicate with someone.<\/p>\n

This bemused doctors, because previously she had only uttered the odd, indecipherable word.<\/p>\n

Hannah had so many questions for Margaret, one of them being why the doctors weren’t speaking to her in English.<\/p>\n

“They are, Hannah,” her sister replied.<\/p>\n

The crash, it seemed, had knocked Hannah’s knowledge of English clear out of her mind.<\/p>\n

But she was left with the German that she had learnt as a child – the language that she defaulted to when speaking to her sister.<\/p>\n

“The doctors didn’t know I could speak German,” Hannah explains. “It wasn’t until they spoke to my sister that they realised.”<\/p>\n

The sisters were brought up in the UK speaking German and English, by polyglot parents. Their Austrian mother spoke four languages and their father, a language teacher from Wales, spoke seven.<\/p>\n

“German was my first oral language,” says Hannah. “It was a rule we had in my house – that when we speak to my family it’s always in German, just to keep the language fresh in our heads.<\/p>\n

“I couldn’t get my head around the fact that in the hospital they were speaking English. My brain had lost my ability to understand that.”<\/p>\n

Hannah was experiencing something called secondary language loss, according to consultant neurosurgeon Colin Shieff, who is also trustee of brain injury charity Headway.<\/p>\n

“Our brains are very sensitive and anything that has the ability to disturb the computer in any way can potentially impact upon the words coming out,” he says.<\/p>\n

“There is no algorithm that would follow that a specific injury will invariably result in the loss of German nouns or English grammar, but we do lose those bits.”<\/p>\n

He says the skills learned in childhood are those most likely to be retained – the ability to say “yes” or “no” or even to repeat a nursery rhyme. He says “something that’s been ingrained for ever” – is more likely to remain intact and those skills learned later, are the first to go.<\/p>\n

Why did Hannah lose her speech?<\/strong><\/p>\n