A British woman says she has “lost part of her identity” after suffering a stroke while on 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 gave way as she walked 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 revealed she had suffered a stroke. When Cathy woke up the next morning, the entire left side of her body was paralysed — and to her surprise, 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. They don’t promise that it will come back — it’s really rare. I feel like I lost part of my identity.”
In March 2025, doctors diagnosed Cathy with Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS), a rare neurological condition in which a person’s speech changes to sound like a different accent following brain injury.
She spent a month in a Turkish hospital before being cleared to fly home to the UK in October 2024. Once back in England, she spent another two months in hospital, followed by three months of intensive 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 explained. “I had to learn to walk with different aids, first a tripod, then a crutch, and now I can walk independently.”
Although Cathy has largely regained her mobility, her voice remains permanently altered. “It’s not the same, and I don’t know if it ever will be,” she said.
Her experience mirrors that of others who have developed Foreign Accent Syndrome, including British woman Zoe Coles, who previously revealed she “doesn’t fit in anymore” after waking up with a Welsh accent caused by a neurological disorder.