English woman’s plea for expert help after waking up with Welsh accent

An English woman is asking for medical help after her accent bizarrely changed overnight. 

Zoe Coles woke up one morning to find she had a strong Welsh accent, despite claiming to have never set foot in Wales in her life. 

“Literally, I opened my eyes, I opened my mouth, and I’m Welsh,” the Lincolnshire woman explained in a video posted to her TikTok page. 

Watch the video above.

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Coles believes she has developed an extremely rare condition called Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS) after her accent first began to morph from German to Welsh around six weeks ago. 

When she first developed the new Welsh lilt, Coles says that she had hoped it would be a “blip”. 

But after six weeks, the worried English woman tells her followers that she can’t even remember what her old accent sounds like. 

“I’ve just got this accent and it won’t go away, i think it’s stuck,” Coles added. 

The pub worker claims she has even had to stop working at her job due to the strange new lilt she is speaking in. 

“I’ve come away from work because I woke up six weeks ago with this accent,” she explains. 

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The English woman had already received a diagnosis in 2022 of Functional Neurological Disorder after experiencing chronic pain, loss of motor control and other issues with her speech. 

But now, the worried woman who normally has a southern English accent, believes the cause of her new speech is FAS. 

FAS is an rare speech disorder where the person still speaks their native language but develops what sounds like a foreign accent from a country not of their origin.

Coles spoke to BBC News, sharing her concerns that the accent change was a separate diagnosis to her FND. 

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“There are many FND sufferers but this accent syndrome… something has obviously gone wrong up in my brain, like something’s obviously not right, because who on earth wakes up speaking a totally different accent?” she told the outlet. 

“So I would like to work with somebody [who] can help me and then we can help others.”

Coles has been appealing to medical experts and scientists on TikTok to help determine any problems occurring neurologically. 

The TikToker has been chronicling her accent change journey for the last six weeks on her account. 

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In her most recent TikTok video posted to her handle @zoecoles1, Coles has desperately asked her followers to help find a neurologist. 

The Lincolnshire native is seeking a neurologist after she was unable to get referred to a specialist at St George’s University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. 

“Help a girl out”, Coles captioned the video that has been viewed almost 14 000 times in the last couple of days. 

“Something isn’t right up there and i want you to figure out what’s going on,” Coles pleaded, appealing to any neurologists who would be interested in looking at her brain function.

Hopefully the internet will do it’s fairy godmother work and help Coles find the specialist help she is seeking.

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