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Texas woman wakes up from jaw surgery with British accent (VIDEO)
Lisa Alamia was diagnosed with foreign accent syndrome, a condition that has affected less than 100 people in the last century, after a procedure to correct an overbite left her with nerve damage six months ago.
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“’Mum’ is probably the one word I notice right away,” Alamia, 33, told CBS affiliate KHOU. “’Kitten [is another]. They think I’m talking about a baby cat. I’m not. I’m saying ‘I’m just kidding.’”
The disorder is usually brought about by brain damage either from a stroke or a traumatic injury but in some cases, including Alamia’s, no clear cause has been identified.
The accent has made Alamia feel like an outsider in her eastern Texas hometown of Rosenberg.
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“People who don’t know me, they’re like, ‘Hey, where are you from?’” she said. “’Oh, you’re from here? How do you talk like that?’”
The condition has been reported to have switched accents from British to Chinese, Spanish to Hungarian and Japanese to Korean.
There’s no easy way to shake the foreign accent — treatment typically involves speech therapy and counseling.
Alamia said at first she was embarrassed by her new accent.
“I didn’t know the reaction I was going to get from people,” she told KHOU. “Are they going to think I’m lying or even understand how I’m speaking?”
But after a few months, she learned to live with the condition.
“My daughter laughs at the way I say ‘tamales.’ I used to be able to say it like a real Hispanic girl. Now, I cannot,” she joked.
Credit: Daily News