An Asian-Australian woman says she has been left with an Irish accent months after having her tonsils taken out.
Bewildered Angie Yen fears her voice may never return to normal and says her only association with Ireland is that she used to enjoy watching hit TV drama Peaky Blinders.
She says she only noticed her new accent after she started singing in the shower.
The Brisbane-based Aussie suddenly heard words coming out of her mouth that she had never said before – and two months on, she still has it.
Angie is now worried things won’t ever go back to normal after saying she feels like she has woken up in the wrong body.
“I had my tonsils taken out on April 19th, and about a week and a half or ten days later I woke up with an Irish-sounding accent which I didn’t recognise,” she told the On The Hard Shoulder podcast.
“I am as Asian as they come – maybe 500 generations ago somewhere there is an Irish line somewhere.
“I had no Irish influences whatsoever except maybe watching some Peaky Blinders episodes many years ago, and I listened to the Cranberries when I was a kid.
“But nothing that explains why. It is just so sudden and so bizarre.”
She went on: “I was getting ready for a job interview and I was just singing in the shower which I normally do, and all these words were coming out; all the sounds I had never heard of before.
(Image: @angie.mcyen?/TikTok)
“I was panicking. I was in so much shock. I thought I was having a Freaky Friday moment; that I had woken up in the wrong body.”
Angie, who has been offered speech therapy to try and revert back to normal, later called one of her friends to “check whether I was talking in this funny way or my brain had gone crazy”.
After going viral on TikTok, she was contacted by researchers at 60 Minutes Australia who tried to get to the bottom of why it had happened.
(Image: BBC/Caryn Mandabach Productions/Tiger Aspect Drama/Robert Viglasky)
But a brain scan found no abnormalities – and she is still searching for answers.
“I know everything is healthy but they still can’t tell me more,” she added.
‘I still have some doubts whether maybe I am going to wake up one day with another accent or maybe my Aussie accent is going to come back. We don’t really know because the science is still so young in this area.”
Doctors have told her that it is not uncommon to never find out the cause of the syndrome.