Xenophonia: a new term in psychiatry?

Studying the international literature in psychiatry and the publications in psychiatric journals, we could not identify any simple term that could describe ‘strange’ speech.

Currently there are terms that only partly describe what we wanted to be included in a single general term. For example, schizophrenic speech is composed of unusual oral creations which cannot be considered as a language as the latter is nothing if it is not creative. ¹ The term ‘schizophasia’ designates, specifically, at least two forms of unconventional surface speech behaviours – ‘glossomanic behaviour’ and ‘glossolalic behaviour’ – that can be observed in certain patients who experience a psychotic episode. ² Both can be spectacular. The essential characteristics of ‘glossomanic schizophasia’ is the production of utterances the linguistic components of which – be they phonemes, words or more complex units – are selected and combined on the basis of superficial or semantic kinships rather than an immediately shareable topic. The main characteristic of ‘glossolalic schizophasia’ is an entirely or nearly entirely neologistic discourse. ¹

However, the Greek term xenophonia describes what we are looking for. The exact definition for xenophonia is any strange/odd/paradoxical voice or speech ^3,4 and xenophonic is one who speaks or sounds strange. Following a thorough research of all available databases, including EMBASE, MEDLINE and PsycINFO, without any language restriction, the term xenophonia has been referred to in only one paper, a non-psychiatric study. It is being used there to describe a vocal abnormality during and after the sound variation stage; the main symptoms are high tone, low voice, short breath and unstable sound control, which are usually a functional variation, a habitual vocal defect. ⁵

As the term xenophonia has never been mentioned in our fields of interest we would like to propose it as a new psychiatric term which describes the phenomena of generally ‘strange speech’.