A British woman says she has “lost part of her identity” after suffering a stroke during a holiday in Turkey and waking up with what doctors describe as a Thai accent.
Cathy Warren, 29, from Basingstoke in Hampshire, was celebrating her 28th birthday with friends in Fethiye in September last year when she suddenly became dizzy and her legs stopped working while walking to dinner. “I hadn’t experienced any symptoms other than a bad headache earlier in the day, which I thought was just heat stroke,” she recalled.
Her friends rushed her to hospital, where scans confirmed she had suffered a stroke. When Cathy woke up the next day, the entire left side of her body was paralysed, and she was shocked to find her voice had changed. “I used to have a British voice, but I woke up and my accent was different,” she said. “My mum’s from Thailand, so she has a Thai accent. I would say that the accent I have now sounds like hers, it’s Thai, it’s foreign. The doctors think it’s because of my mum and because it happened abroad. The doctors don’t promise that it will come back, it’s really rare. I feel like I lost part of my identity.”
In March 2025, she was diagnosed with Foreign Accent Syndrome, a rare condition in which a person’s speech develops a different accent after brain injury. Cathy spent a month in a Turkish hospital before being cleared to fly home in October 2024. Back in England, she remained hospitalised for two more months and then underwent three months of rehabilitation to relearn how to walk. “I needed three people to walk at first — it was probably five minutes per day for a month,” she said. “I had to learn to walk more with different aids, first a tripod, then a crutch, and now I can walk independently.”
Cathy says that while her mobility has largely recovered, her voice still hasn’t returned to what it was before. “It’s not the same, and I don’t know if it ever will be,” she said.
Her story echoes that of others who have experienced similar conditions, including another British woman, Zoe Coles, who said she “doesn’t fit in anymore” after waking up with a Welsh accent due to a neurological disorder.
