Texan gets jaw surgery, wakes up with British accent

ROSENBERG, TEXAS - A mother of three has been diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder causing her to suddenly speak with a British accent.

“They are always asking me how my mom got that accent,” Kylie Alamia said about her mom, Lisa.

Despite her accent, Lisa Alamia is 100 percent Texan.

“People who don’t know me, they’re like, 'Hey, where are you from?'" Lisa Alamia said. “I’m from Rosenberg. They’re like, 'Where is that?' I’m like, 'Right here in Rosenberg.' 'Oh, you’re from here? How do you talk like that?' So that’s where the whole story comes up.”

Six months ago, jaw surgery to correct an overbite also changed Lisa Alamia’s speech.

“I thought she was joking with me,” said Kayla Alamia, Lisa Alamia’s oldest daughter. “But then she showed me that the doctor diagnosed her with foreign accent syndrome. Then I was like, 'Oh, Lord.'”

A Houston Methodist Sugar Land Hospital doctor said less than 100 people worldwide in the last 100 years get the syndrome.  

“'Mum' is probably the one word I notice right away,” Alamia said. “'Kitten' (is another). They think I’m talking about a baby cat. I’m not. I’m saying, 'I’m just kidding.'”

Lisa Alamia’s neurologist, Dr. Toby Yaltho, put her through a battery of tests trying to answer the how’s and why’s.  So far, he can’t.

For months, Lisa Alamia stayed quiet while worried about skeptics.

“I didn’t know the reaction I was going to get from people,” Lisa Alamia said. “So I didn’t know if they’re going to judge me. Are they going to think I’m lying or even understand how I’m speaking?”

Thanks to some ribbing from her family and friends, Lisa Alamia is more open than ever. Though her voice no longer intimidates her children.

“They’re like now there’s no way you sound ‘hood at all,” Lisa Alamia said. “Even if you tried, you wouldn’t be able to sound that way. 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.”

Didge wrote:British accent?

Do they mean English, of which there is conckney, geordie, scouse, manc etc, so many to choose from, or Welsh, Scottich accents etc?

Bit vauge

Didge wrote:Well i am at a loss and agree it has more a tinge of Australian/New Zealand of an accent
Did not really sound British, but I guess many accents do stem from the UK, but again some like we know in the US are old Emglish accents

Ben Reilly wrote:

Didge wrote:Well i am at a loss and agree it has more a tinge of Australian/New Zealand of an accent
Did not really sound British, but I guess many accents do stem from the UK, but again some like we know in the US are old Emglish accents

Americans often confuse other English accents -- some can't tell the difference between London and Sydney, etc. I've always had an ear for them, so I don't get it.

Are there accents that Brits sometimes confuse? Could have sworn I heard some British person say that Australians and Texans sounded alike, and I saw an interview where Paul McCartney said the Beatles thought Texans sounded more like them than most Americans did ...

Didge wrote:

Ben Reilly wrote:

Didge wrote:Well i am at a loss and agree it has more a tinge of Australian/New Zealand of an accent
Did not really sound British, but I guess many accents do stem from the UK, but again some like we know in the US are old Emglish accents

Americans often confuse other English accents -- some can't tell the difference between London and Sydney, etc. I've always had an ear for them, so I don't get it.

Are there accents that Brits sometimes confuse? Could have sworn I heard some British person say that Australians and Texans sounded alike, and I saw an interview where Paul McCartney said the Beatles thought Texans sounded more like them than most Americans did ...

Cockney accents can and do get confused with Australian and I have often been asked by Americans where i am from in Australia



I imagine there is many different US accents, which many of us could never tell apart, as we are not used to hearing them as we would British accents. The same with every nation I guess ben

WhoseYourWolfie wrote:

I've never heard any Aussies that sound like her;

But I have heard a couple of Kiwis that sounded a bit like that.
Especially one NZ woman who does certain TV_shopping commercials..

That Texan woman even sounded a little South African, at times...

Major wrote:There will be queues miles long in Dallas now.

Newport woman wakes up after surgery speaking with British accent
By Lynne Terry | The Oregonian/OregonLive The Oregonian  
April 30, 2011
When Karen Butler came out of sedation after oral surgery a year and a half ago, her mouth throbbed and her face was puffy. But that's not all that had changed. When she spoke, the words tumbled out in a thick and foreign accent.
"I sounded like I was from Transylvania," she said.
Over the next few days, the swelling subsided and the pain vanished, but Butler's newly acquired accent did not. Though it has softened over time, she's never again spoken like a native Oregonian from Madras. To most people, she sounds British.
It took months to find an explanation: foreign accent syndrome, a disorder so rare that only about 60 cases have been documented worldwide since the early 1900s.
She's the first known case in Oregon, said Dr. Ted Lowenkopf,  medical director of the statewide Providence Stroke Center.
Karen Butler, who grew up in Madras, now sounds to most people like she's from Britain, even though she's never been there and has no British relatives. She developed foreign accent syndrome in late 2009 after dental surgery, one of only about 60 cases worldwide since the 1900s. She's the only known case in Oregon. Unlike others, who've become depressed after their speech pattern changed, she's having fun with her new accent. "In a scale of one to 100, this doesn't even rank a one," she says.
The condition changed Butler's life, forcing her to answer endless questions about her accent. Most people are incredulous at first. A few insist she's faking it.
Foreign accent syndrome is usually caused by a stroke, though it also has been associated with multiple sclerosis, head injuries and migraines.
One of the first cases was reported at the turn of the last century by a French neurologist. But the best known case, documented by Norwegian neurologist Georg Herman Monrad-Krohn, was a 30-year-old woman, who was hit by shrapnel from a German air raid over Oslo in 1941. The injury left her with a speech impairment that gradually improved, turning into what sounded like a German accent to her countrymen. Suspecting that she was a collaborator, they ostracized her.
"When it first happened and we didn't know what it was, all kinds of ideas were handed up as possibilities," said Butler, a 56-year-old mother of five. Her family joked that she had spun into a past life regression.
She sought help from her dentist and family physician. Both figured the dentures put in during surgery had caused the change.
She felt that wasn't the case. But in the weeks after the operation at the end of November 2009, she focused on Christmas and then it was January. Manager of an H&R Block office in Newport, she became swamped in work.
In May, when tax season died down, she consulted a neurologist in the Corvallis area. After some research, he came up with the diagnosis.
Lowenkopf, who just met Butler last week, said the syndrome remains much of a mystery. Although he read about it in his neurological training, he had never encountered it before in real life.
"I'm amazed by it, and intrigued by it," he said.
It's unclear what caused her speech pattern to change. Dental surgeries do not pose a stroke risk and the drug that Butler says the dentist used to sedate her -- Halcion --  has not been linked to strokes.
Her dentist, Gregory Herkert,  did not want to comment.
Lowenkopf said the syndrome has been linked to injuries in different areas of the brain -- the left frontal lobe, the right side and the cerebellum, a "little brain" tucked back on the bottom. The damage is almost always very small, which is why the syndrome is so rare. Strokes usually involve a bigger injury with a bigger impact, depriving a patient of the ability to speak intelligibly, for example, or to understand others.
"What happens with foreign accent syndrome to the best of our understanding is that a very, very small part of the speech area is affected so that the normal intonation of speech gets altered," he said.
He believes that patients adapt, making them sound to others as if they have an accent.
She would like to have a brain scan -- to compare with one she had years ago -- but can't afford it and her insurance won't shell out the money. Tests show she has no physical problems.
Everything works," she said, "It just works odd."
She and her family have taken the change in stride, even delighting in it.
"This is not a tragedy," said her husband, Glen Butler,  a retired Coast Guard official. "The only thing that changed was her voice. She's still her."
She doesn't even hear her new accent -- unless she watches herself on a video.
"I'm very lucky it was not something that was devastating," she said. "On a scale of one to 100 this doesn't even come up to a one."
Like many others diagnosed with the condition, she's never been to the country her accent seems to stem from, though she did study German in eighth-grade and does collect teapots -- but from America.
 "Although Mrs. Butler has never been to England and has no English relatives as far as we know, I'm sure she's heard an English accent," Lowenkopf said.
Other native English language speakers with the syndrome have sounded Russian, Chinese, German, Spanish, Jamaican and Italian. But none of the accents is pure, linguists say. Listen closely and you'll hear a mix of sounds caused by the way people produce consonants and vowels or emphasize certain syllables, making them sound foreign.
William F. Katz, professor of communication disorders at the University of Texas at Dallas, has studied a number of patients since 1987 in his speech lab.
"We want to understand the circuits that underlie it and what we can do to fix it," he said. "It's kind of puzzling. Sometimes patients get very frustrated."
His lab's recent attempt to retrain the speech patterns of a Dallas woman who was often mistaken for being Swedish failed, but he said she had other medical issues.
Butler doubts she could be retrained to speak like an Oregonian again. "Others can pretend to talk in different ways," she said. "I can't. That's gone."
Gone, too, is her shyness. Before the surgery, she was painfully shy.
No longer.
"Before I was just an ordinary person," she said. "Now everybody is intrigued. They want to know where you're from. So I've learned in the last year that it's OK to be social. I like it actually."
http://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/index.ssf/2011/04/newport_woman_wakes_up_after_surgery_speaking_with_british_accent.html

Ben Reilly wrote:

Major wrote:There will be queues miles long in Dallas now.

Why would people line up nearly 300 miles from where she lives?

It's not like you can't hear plenty of British accents in Texas, anyway. We even have British grocers run by living, breathing British people!



It's amazing what airplanes can do these days.

eddie wrote:

Ben Reilly wrote:

Major wrote:There will be queues miles long in Dallas now.

Why would people line up nearly 300 miles from where she lives?

It's not like you can't hear plenty of British accents in Texas, anyway. We even have British grocers run by living, breathing British people!



It's amazing what airplanes can do these days.

l

Do you mean I won't be the only one there when I come over?

Was gonna call myself a 'Brixan'

eddie wrote:Don't think storm will like it.

WhoseYourWolfie wrote:

I've never heard any Aussies that sound like her;

But I have heard a couple of Kiwis that sounded a bit like that.
Especially one NZ woman who does certain TV_shopping commercials..

That Texan woman even sounded a little South African, at times...

veya_victaous wrote:

WhoseYourWolfie wrote:

I've never heard any Aussies that sound like her;

But I have heard a couple of Kiwis that sounded a bit like that.
Especially one NZ woman who does certain TV_shopping commercials..

That Texan woman even sounded a little South African, at times...

yeah sounds English to me.
I cant really here aussie, maybe and immigrant for Britian.

nicko wrote:Why do Australians raise their voices higher at the end of a sentence?

Mostly the Females do it.

nicko wrote:Why do Australians raise their voices higher at the end of a sentence?

Mostly the Females do it.

Ben Reilly wrote:

nicko wrote:Why do Australians raise their voices higher at the end of a sentence?

Mostly the Females do it.

Pretty typical in the U.S. as well, sadly.

eddie wrote:

Ben Reilly wrote:

nicko wrote:Why do Australians raise their voices higher at the end of a sentence?

Mostly the Females do it.

Pretty typical in the U.S. as well, sadly.

It's an affected way of speaking and I'm sure people think it makes them sound hip.
It just makes them sound like they're unsure of everything they say.

eddie wrote:It's pretty annoying? I don't like it? I'm sure you don't?
Thought I'd annoy you before bed?  

Ben Reilly wrote:

eddie wrote:It's pretty annoying? I don't like it? I'm sure you don't?
Thought I'd annoy you before bed?  

It's like, so juvenile? Like someone called upon by the teacher? And they're not sure they grasp the material? And they're not taking anything, like, seriously?

nicko wrote:
Why do Australians raise their voices higher at the end of a sentence?

Mostly the Females do it.

Tommy Monk wrote:https://youtu.be/IQmsidGW-WA