Texas mom sounds British after surgery

An American mum of three has woken up from surgery with a British accent.

But it’s rare that a person speaking Texan – you know what I mean – goes in for routine jaw surgery and comes out sounding British.

Alamia says at first she was nervous about coming forward because of skeptics, but with support from her friends, she has embraced the accent.

Foreign accent syndrome is associated with a brain injury, but Alamia’s doctor said she was normal and healthy after a series of tests. “Then I was like, ‘Oh, Lord”.

Alamia said she has become more comfortable with the accent after learning that “something going on in my brain is triggering” it. For a time, she feared seeing people she knew because she thought they’d think she was faking the accent. ‘Oh you’re from here how do you talk like that?’

Still, she is pursuing speech therapy in the hope she can regain her usual way of speaking. After a life-threatening bout of pneumonia that left the then-48-year-old former “Wham!” frontman in a coma, he awoke with what he described as a “West Country accent”.

Cases of foreign accent syndrome are extremely rare and there is no centre for the study of the condition.

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.

“I didn’t know the reaction I was going to get from people”, Alamia told the news station of her new voice.

“I can’t think of a reason the jaw surgery would cause it”, Yalto said.

And in 2010, Invercargill woman Bronwyn Fox believed the condition had changed her speech, leaving her with an accent that was a mixture of Welsh, Scottish and North London.

Even her daughter, Kayla, was skeptical of her mother’s condition.

“They’re complex conditions, which are genuinely experienced, and they’re not people making stuff up”. “I used to be able to say it like a real Hispanic girl”.