British woman wakes from stroke speaking in Thai accent
Speech twist leaves family stunned as daughter’s voice mirrors her mother’s heritage
A British woman who suffered a stroke during a holiday in Turkey got the shock of her life when she woke up sounding like her Thai mum.
The woman, 29 year old Cathy Warren, who is half Thai and half British, was on holiday with friends in Fethiye, Turkey, in September last year to celebrate her 28th birthday when disaster struck. While walking to dinner, she was suddenly hit with dizziness and found her legs had “stopped working.”
“We’d just taken some pictures and suddenly I couldn’t walk. My legs wouldn’t move, so my friend put me on a sun lounger and went to get help.”
Hotel staff initially assumed the British woman was drunk and wheeled her back to her room. But as her condition worsened, a doctor was called, and she was rushed to the hospital. Scans confirmed the shocking diagnosis: she had suffered a stroke.
When Warren regained consciousness, she was paralysed down her left side and speaking with a completely different accent.
“I used to have a British voice, but I woke up and my accent was different. My mum’s from Thailand, and now I sound like her: it’s Thai, it’s foreign.”
Doctors diagnosed her with foreign accent syndrome, a rare neurological condition caused by damage to the brain’s language and speech centres. According to neurologist Dr Greg David Dayrit, the condition is characterised by changes in rhythm, intonation and pronunciation, making a person sound like they’ve adopted a foreign accent, even if they haven’t spoken that way before.
Warren, from Basingstoke in Hampshire, said she feels like she’s “lost part of her identity.” Despite months of speech therapy, her accent remains changed, The Daily Mail and The Philippine Star reported.
“I finished speech therapy, but my voice has stayed the same. The doctors don’t promise that it will come back — it’s really rare.”
The woman spent a month in a Turkish hospital before returning to the UK in October 2024. There, she underwent a further five months of treatment and rehab, learning to walk again with the help of a tripod, then a crutch. By summer 2025, she could walk independently.
“I needed three people to help me walk at first. Now I can do it on my own, but my voice still doesn’t sound like me.”
Latest Thailand News
Follow The Thaiger on Google News:
