KEY POINTS
- Zoe Coles has never visited Wales and yet, woke up one morning with a Welsh accent.
- She hope it "would just be a blip", but she still has it six weeks later.
- She believes the recent change in her voice has come about as a result of foreign accent syndrome.
When English woman Zoe Coles woke up six weeks ago, she was surprised to hear herself speaking in a different accent.
"Literally, I open my eyes, I open my mouth, and I'm Welsh," the Lincolnshire native, who has never visited Wales, said in a TikTok video.
"Never in my life have I been able to do an accent, and here I am rocking it."
When the 36-year-old first developed her new lilt, she hoped it "would just be a blip" and she would "get over it".
"It won't go away. I think it's stuck," she said.
"We've all forgotten what I usually sound like. I don’t know what my old voice was like.
"I've just adapted, I've had to. What else can I do other than just get on with it?"
Before her accent changed, Coles worked in a pub, but she's since had to quit her job.
"I don't feel like I fit in anywhere. Everywhere I go, when I talk, people look at me," she said.
"I don't mind the accent but other people make me feel awkward."
In 2022, Coles was diagnosed with functional neurological disorder (FND), an incurable condition that has left her with chronic pain, loss of motor control, slurred speech, and tics.
She believes the recent change in her voice has come about as a result of foreign accent syndrome (FAS) — a rare speech disorder that typically develops after a person sustains brain damage from something like a stroke or head injury.
Coles is now looking for a neurologist or another kind of expert to help her after her referral to a specialist in London was rejected because she doesn't live in the hospital's catchment area.
"Something has obviously gone wrong up in my brain, like something's obviously not right, because who on earth wakes up speaking (with) a totally different accent?," she told BBC News
"I would like to work with somebody that can help me and then we can help others.
"But let's start with me – I'll be your guinea pig."
