A 47-year-old woman from Western France has been speaking with a distinctively English accent ever since she had her tonsils removed 14 years ago.
Laetitia, a cashier from Montval-sur-Loir, in France’s Sarthe Department, doesn’t speak English. She only knows some basic words that she learned in school decades ago, but hearing her speak in her native tongue would have you believe she was born in England. For 14 years, Laetitia has been speaking with an English accent that makes most people think she is Anglo-Saxon. But the truth is much stranger – the 47-year-old woman has been stuck with her English accent ever since she woke up from a tonsil removal surgery. Her children had gone through the same procedure before, and they talked in a nasal voice, but it went away after a few days, so she wasn’t too worried in the beginning, but as the weeks passed, her weird accent remained just as strong.
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“When I woke up, I had this accent,” Laetitia recently told Le Petit Courrier. “I saw the surgeon there after the operation. He didn’t mention any specific problems, so I wasn’t worried. I then went to the post-op appointment three weeks later. He told me, ‘Everything’s fine, everything’s OK.’ I asked him when I would get my voice back. He replied, ‘You have to be patient.’”
Three months later, he went to see the doctor again and told him she had been patient enough, but she wanted her old voice back. At first, he didn’t understand what she was talking about, and when she told him about the English accent, he asked her, ‘Aren’t you Anglo-Saxon?’ Even the doctor couldn’t believe she didn’t speak proper English, but only had this weird accent.
“On examination, everything is normal. I don’t know what to tell you; you’re a mystery to science,” Laetitia’s doctor told her.
Over the years, Laetitia saw several doctors, including an ENT specialist, but no one could tell her why she had developed the English accent or if there was any way to get rid of it. She was eventually diagnosed with Foreign Accent Syndrome, an extremely rare condition that can be caused by an accident, a stroke, or an operation. Laetita’s medical records show that during her tonsil surgery, an area of the brain was less well irrigated, which may have caused her English accent.
Although she still wants her old voice back, and some people think she is messing with them, especially family members who haven’t spoken to her in a while, Laetitia has gotten used to her unusual accent. It’s part of her now, so she has grown to accept it.
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