Croatian girl wakes up from coma speaking fluent German

A 13-year old Croatian girl woke up from a coma speaking no Croatian and perfect German. The girl, who had been studying basic German in school, is communicating with her parents via an interpreter. Experts are investigating the cause.

• [dculberson]

  More seriously, this is really interesting to me. Years ago, a friend got into a car accident with mild head injuries. He came out of it with what people described as an English accent, cockney specifically. But it wasn’t at all an English accent, it was just clipping of certain vowels and some sharper consonants – any actual English person wouldn’t identify it as familiar. But it was enough for the punks – he was our hero.

  But this is a lot more complex, and a lot more amazing. I would love to see a before vs. after MRI while she’s speaking. The before is probably not available though. (Makes me want to go get an MRI just to have one in the archives..)

• [Anonymous]

  Happens quite often actually. It’s a brain condition known as Foreign Accent Syndrome.

  See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3235934.stm

• [merreborn]

  “Perfect german” implies fluency of grammar, lack of accent, and a full vocabulary. I suspect that the reality, if there’s any truth to this story at all, is far less extraordinary.

  I can imagine a loss of accent — if you’ve heard unaccented german, maybe you can replicate it. I can believe a *small* improvement in grammar — if you’ve heard correct german grammar, maybe you can replicate it. However, I cannot believe a major increase in vocabulary.

  You cannot use words you’ve never experienced first hand. To suggest that this girl was able to use german words which she’d never personally encountered requires a spectacular explanation. Unless you suggest that she learned a full german vocabulary via some form of telepathy, you make a bold statement as to the nature of knowledge and language.

  To suggest that one can spontaneously and independently derive the entire vocabulary of a language devoid of external input is to suggest that either there is some sort of logic to the way words are constructed (there isn’t really — instead they’re randomly evolved over centuries, stolen from other languages, etc.), or you suggest that ‘a priori’ knowledge of a contemporary human language is possible — that modern german was somehow inside this girl’s head without external input, having arrived there either spontaneously, or at birth.

  • [peterbruells]

    I’ll note that it’s near impossible to find a someone speaking „perfectly, unaccented German“. While we kinda agree on a common standard, inflection, local vocabulary, etc usually gives the speaker away.

    It’s pretty well understood – the BKA (think FBI, it’s close enough for TV) has databases and experts which can pinpoint the area a caller lived in during his youth down to a couple of kilometres.

• [Anonymous]

  This does happen. My sister knew a woman who was in a terrible accident (no coma though) and came-to swearing and shouting at everyone in Spanish and seemingly unable to speak English. She had not previously learned Spanish. The only connection with the language was that she had lived in a community with a large and vibrant Hispanic population.

• [kutsuwamushi]

  It takes thousands upon thousands of hours of immersion in order to learn a language to full fluency. It’s unbelievable that someone who’s studying a second language in school will suddenly be able to speak it fluently after brain damage: they simply haven’t been exposed to enough information.

  Since it seems like the original sources aren’t even claiming that she speaks perfect German, it seems less like this story is an intentional hoax, and more like a game of journalistic telephone has exaggerated–again.

  Anyone who studies language can tell you that it’s fascinatingly, mind-bogglingly complex, and that the rules we intuitively know are a dense tangle of interrelated conditions, connotations, cultural scripts, and so on. There’s so much more than simply learning grammar and vocabulary, which is a monumental task in itself. Even if she was suddenly able to perfectly recall and reproduce every thing she’s heard in German–unlikely, as some information is bound to be lost simply due to the nature of memory–there still wouldn’t be enough information for her to derive fluent German.

• [Milena]

  Actually, a significant improvement in vocabulary is the easiest bit to believe: with second and third languages, people generally develop a much larger passive knowledge (i.e. ability to understand words) than the active one (ability to speak properly, but also ability to remember appropriate words when you need them). So all an increase of vocabulary would require would be an increased access to the passive vocab. Those wouldn’t be words she’d never encountered, but rather words she understood, but couldn’t recall while her first language was in the way. (And yes, both first and second language do get in the way of active word recall.)

• [valdis]

  My parents were Latvian immigrants who had been in the US for several decades when this happened a few years ago. My mom had a stroke, and my dad took her to the hospital. Several hours later, she’s fast asleep and likely to stay that way for a while, so the nurses suggest to my dad that he go down to the hospital cafeteria and get some dinner into himself. He’s just finishing up his food, and a nurse comes running in, saying my mom is awake, very agitated, and babbling incoherently.

  So my dad goes up to the room, and he can’t figure out what the nurses are talking about, as he can understand her just fine, and she’s telling him how the nurses are a bunch of idiots who aren’t listening to a thing she says, and though it was 40 years since she worked as a nurse, things aren’t THAT different and they don’t have a clue about their job, and lots of detailed commentary about their probable parentage causing their cluelessness.

  Finally after a few minutes they sorted it out.

  My mom had lost all knowledge of English, which was a second language, and she had lost the knowledge that she knew English. So she’s trying to talk to the nurse in Latvian, and the nurse is of course puzzled, because Latvian is sufficiently dis-similar to most other languages that it doesn’t usually trigger a “Hey, that sounds like German or something”. Meanwhile, my dad isn’t twigging on to it very fast, because she almost never speaks to him in English, so her speaking in fluent Latvian is perfectly normal. Once he explained to her that it was an American hospital and they only spoke English, things got much calmer. ;)

• [sapere_aude]

  Remember the game of “telephone” where someone whispers something into someone’s ear, who then turns and whispers it into someone else’s ear, who then turns and whispers it into someone else’s ear, and so on? The first person might have whispered something that makes perfect sense; but, by the time it has passed through all of the whispering intermediaries, it has morphed into something incredible. I think that’s what’s happening here.

  A girl in Croatia had a neurological problem that left her with aphasia in her native language, forcing her to use words from a second language she was learning in order to express herself. This somehow got reported to the local (Croatian) news. Then the story got picked up by other European and international news sources, where it got translated into various languages (including English). And then, by the time the New York Daily News ran the story, it had morphed into an incredible tale of a Croatian girl waking up from a coma, speaking fluent German in spite of the fact that she was a just a novice learner of the language.

  If something sounds incredible, and you’re trying to figure out how it’s possible, the simplest explanation — namely that the story is not as incredible as it sounds, because certain details have been distorted and exaggerated in the retelling — is usually the correct one.

  • [Praline]

    Exactamundo. Very well put.

• [wylkyn]

  What? There weren’t any article from the Weekly World News you could post? I think that you could at least have continued the chain of journalistic exaggeration evident in this article and claimed that she woke up from the coma as Adolph Hitler or something.

• [Anonymous]

  I was in a Coma for 30+ days and when I awoke I spoke a language that I had not spoken in 15+ years, Greek, and could not remember how to speak, read, or write English for 6 weeks so this is a very understandable and possible. Even to this day, 7 years post coma I still have trouble remembering the words I mean and or want to say in English.

• [Anonymous]

  Could be she’s just faking it. Think about it: full dayworth of sleep and rest, away from parents, school and homework… and then you wake up and see your folks looking at you worryingly. I can imagine her train of thought: “sranje… ..uhm… waas? eeh fershteah zee nikht. eeh bin ain berliner…”

• [Anonymous]

  I am unconvinced; it may be that there is a grain of truth buried somewhere. Or not. I have heard of people reverting to their native language, but this ? Highly likely-I don’t think.

• [Daemon]

  I’m learning Japanese. I could afford a few weeks in a coma…

  • [Anonymous]

    lol
    me too soo funny. But seriously, things that happen in life are strange

• [zikman]

  http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23412138-czech-speedway-rider-knocked-out-in-crash-wakes-up-speaking-perfect-english.do
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenoglossy

• [Berandor]

  I think this article is a hoax, really. A typical snopes rumor – somewhere in Croatia, where confirmation of this story is hard to come by, a girl suddenly speaks German. And in rural India, a man gave birth to a cow.

  • [Anonymous]

    I live in Croatia, and I live in Split ( the city where the girl is hospitalizied ). The newspaper that published this story is one of the larger ones, but the author of the article is not very trustworthy. So the story might be completely bogus.

  • [Anonymous]

    You’re right, here in Croatia we still don’t have the benefit of enjoying the discovery of fire and cars are treated like miracles. Internet? Magazines? Social networking? We’re get there in 200 years!

    Learn something about the country you’re bashing before doing so, not everything outside your little “perfect” world is a barren desert populated by idiots who can’t communicate.

• [apoxia]

  I bet she’s not speaking perfect German. I had a man who couldn’t take part in my study as his dementia had stripped away his second language (English), and left him with his native language (German). Usually you lose the less ingrained language first. I’d like to hear more about this story.

• [stumo]

  Croatia is a real place, you know.

  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/croatia/7583971/Croatian-teenager-wakes-from-coma-speaking-fluent-German.html seems pretty detailed for “a hoax”.

  • [dculberson]

    “Croatia is a real place, you know.”

    Oh, come on!! Next you’ll be claiming there’s such a place as Antwerp. I’m not falling for that again.

• [numcrun]

  Ummm…..this is impossible. If she didn’t have the vocab where did she magically get it from.

• [Anonymous]

  Is this the start of a ‘LOST’ ARG or something?

• [Mac]

  There have been similar symptoms reported in people who have suffered strokes.

  eg: “Paradoxical Switching to a Barely-mastered Second Language by an Aphasic Patient”
  Ref: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a781076149&db=all

  It sounds very odd, but makes a lot of sense from a brain function point of view. They’ve lost the ability to speak their normal language. (Aphasia) Fortunately they have a new language they were learning but isn’t in the ‘language’ part of the brain yet.

  If they didn’t have that they would be without language at all.

  Interesting.

  Mac

• [Milena]

  FWIW, the article was in Croatian papers, too. However, according to the local sources, the girl isn’t actually speaking “perfect” German, and she understands Croatian. She just can’t express herself in it.
  Yes, my country is a real place, with papers, and electricity, and even the Internet, you know.

• [Aurini]

  Oh, for crying out loud, Croatia isn’t even a real country.

  Yes, yes, we know you have cars there; because as part of the Marshall plan we *exported* cars there, to boost our industry! Last I checked Croatians were still driving 1950s Station Wagons down roads whose primary feature, aside from the cobblestones, is the open sewers running alongside them.

  My buddy visited there last summer, and according to him they don’t even speak *English* there! Instead it’s some sort of foreign baby-talk language.

  Listen Anon, I commend you for trying to better yourself by learning to speak a real language, but as long as you hold onto the apron strings of a child-like culture you’re never going to advance far in life. Please, attend to the errors of your country men – don’t waste the Internet’s time defending them.

• [loonquawl]

  http://dnevnik.hr/vijesti/hrvatska/split-djevojcica-nakon-kome-tjednima-govorila-samo-njemacki.html-
  Google translate is bad on the site, useless for the video – could someone who speaks the language please fill in some details?

• [Heartfruit]

  I love the wacky things I brains can do if they become a little bit damaged. I’d love to know if any of the staff spoke German to her while she was in her coma. I’m not suggesting that they did it on purpose but I figure that if you are working with a coma patient you probably figure you are just talking to yourself so it won’t matter if you use your native language. Perhaps she could hear them.

  • [Jeremyriad]

    Whoa. This is just like what happened to Sun on LOST, except in reverse. If it happens on LOST, it can’t be a hoax!

• [hobomike]

  now THAT’s a way to screw with your parents!

• [Milena]

  @loonquawl: in a nutshell, the girl was admitted running a high fever and fell into a coma. After waking, she started speaking in German, probably due to damage in speech centres, or at least that’s her doctor’s guess. The same doctor also mentioned that similar cases are not unknown, although they’re more usual in older patients, who suffer a stroke and revert to a language they knew in youth, even though they never used it in the meantime and may have forgotten it on a conscious level.
  Another doctor also mentioned a case of a patient who was in a car accident and, after waking from a coma, started speaking a totally different local dialect from her native one. (This may sound trivial, but isn’t — the differences between the two dialects are much larger than, frex, differences between American and British English).