The author describes the case of a woman who sustained a head injury during an air raid. On recovering her speech the patient acquired a broken, foreign accent, which could not be accounted for by an environmental influence. Her disturbance of accent did not consist of a mere loss of the melody of language. Her language still had a melody, but one different from that of her compatriots. It is suggested that there is a fundamental difference between a simple loss of the melody of language (prosodic quality) as occurs in many patients with paralysis agitans and an alteration of that melody such as this patient had. The dysprosody described in this case is obviously a disorder of a higher functional level than the aprosody of paralysis agitans.