A British mum has been left baffled after a heart attack seemingly transformed her accent from “very well spoken” to sounding distinctly Swedish. Georgina Gailey, 60, from Hillingdon, Middlesex, was shocked to find her voice had altered during a FaceTime call with her sister.
Despite having suffered a heart attack over a year earlier, it was only during this conversation that she noticed the change in her speech pattern.
After being taken to hospital, where doctors initially thought she might have had a stroke, Georgina was eventually diagnosed with the rare Foreign Accent Syndrome and has been living with the new accent for three years.
In an interview with What’s The Jam, Georgina expressed her distress: “It’s changed my life, there’s a huge piece of me missing. I was very well spoken and now I sound Swedish. I say ‘ja’ rather than yes. I didn’t notice how different it was at first until I listened to my answer phone message.”
She added, “It’s so different. People will ask where I come from and when I tell them I’m English, they laugh. They think I’m Swedish,” reports the Mirror.
Curiously, Georgina has never even been to Sweden, yet she sounds like she could be from the land of ABBA.
She shared her emotional struggle, saying, “When people laugh, I smile on the surface but underneath it makes me sad. They think I’m foreign but I’m English born and bred. I had a heart attack a few months before. I was getting better and was getting ready to get back to work.
“One night, I was on FaceTime to my sister and she noticed that I was mixing my words up. I went to the hospital and they thought I had a stroke, they kept me in for two weeks and then I was diagnosed with FND.”
Foreign Accent Syndrome is an unusual condition where a person’s speech suddenly changes to an accent different from their native one. This can happen following brain trauma such as a stroke or illness.
Georgina has sought help from several neurologists in an attempt to regain her original accent, but fears she may be stuck with a Swedish twang permanently.
She expressed: “I don’t know if I’ll have the accent forever. It doesn’t feel nice thinking it might be stuck like this forever. My poor family have to put up with me. The longer I have the accent the more likely it is that it will stay.
“My brain will get used to speaking like this. It’s strange because if I sing, I sound English. It does change depending on how much sleep I get. It’s so strange.”
Georgina is now using her experience to raise awareness about this rare condition.
Georgina stated: “I want to raise awareness because the more people know about it the more research will be done. The brain is very complicated. I joined a Facebook group for FND but I don’t personally know anyone who has it. It’s rare. I joined a Facebook group for FND but I don’t personally know anyone who has it.”
