Zoe Coles from Great Britain fell asleep as usual only to wake up hours later with a dialect from Wales, writes The Guardian.
– I assumed it would pass, but two days later I still sounded strange. My neighbor said: “You sound just like my aunt, she’s from South Wales,” Zoe Coles told the newspaper.
After several moves during her upbringing, the woman developed a great awareness of her dialect. When she was eight, her family moved within the UK from Kent to Stamford. In the new place, she was teased for her dialect and then began to imitate the dialects of her new friends.
– When I was 14, we went to Lanzarote and I became friends with two girls from Liverpool and Birmingham. My attempts to imitate their dialects made my family laugh out loud, she tells the newspaper.
Despite attempts to imitate other British dialects, Zoe Coles retained her Kentish dialect throughout her adult life, but in 2022 she developed a functional neurological disorder (FND), a condition that disrupts the way the brain communicates with the body.
The disorder caused mobility problems and seizures, but also caused her to develop intermittent voices and slurred speech.
In June 2023, Zoe Coles woke up with a brand new Welsh dialect, despite never having visited Wales. A few months later, she received a new rare diagnosis: “Foreign accent syndrome”.
According to Modern psychology the condition has been documented worldwide but is very rare.
– I really like my Welsh dialect. I don’t think it will disappear, so it would be fun to visit a place where everyone sounds like me, she says.