Migraine gives her a French accent

A grandmother who went to bed suffering from a migraine was amazed to wake up speaking with a French accent.

Kay Russell, 49, from Bishop Cleeve in Somerset, is now left with a voice that is unrecognisable to family and friends, reports The Daily Mail.

Doctors say she has Foreign Accent Syndrome, a condition which damages the part of the brain that controls speech and word formation.

She has been suffereing from migraines for 20 years.

Their effects are normally limited to temporarily paralysing her limbs and causing slurred speech.She woke up speaking with a French accent earlier this year. But since January 4 this year, she has not spoken with her natural accent.

After one bad migraine, she was left with slurred speech for two weeks and made an appointment to have an MRI scan and see a neurologist. Then one day she simply woke up with a French accent.

"As a sufferer of this syndrome you are not trying to speak in an accent, it is a speech impediment," Russell said.

"My facial muscle movements are different, the inclination is different and the pronunciation. It also affects my hands and makes me write with a foreign accent. For example, I say peoples not people and that is how I would write it."

Russell misses out function words such as 'a', 'of' and 'to' and cannot put on any other accent.

She said: "I rang up a friend I had known since I was a teenager and the last time I had spoken to her I was speaking in my old voice. It took me a while to explain it was me."

When she tried to get her car insured on the phone, the staff insisted she tell them how long she had lived in the UK.

emirates247.com