Brain damage gives woman Chinese accent

By Wu Fan

An English woman who had suffered from acute headaches for a decade has been diagnosed with Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS), changing her Devon accent into a Chinese one.

Born in Germany and having grown up in Plymouth, southwest England, Sarah Colwill, a 35-year-old IT project coordinator, was found to speak with a Chinese accent after a migraine attack March 20.

"I moved to Plymouth when I was 18 months old, so I have always spoken like a local. But following one attack, an ambulance crew arrived and they said I definitely sounded Chinese," she said.

"Since then, I've had friends hang up on me as they think I'm a hoax caller," she was quoted as saying by the Mirror Tuesday. "I speak in a much higher tone; my voice is all squeaky. I'm having speech therapy but don't know if the Chinese accent will ever go away.

"It was funny at first, but to think I'm stuck with this gets me down. My voice has begun to annoy me.

"I have never been to China. I just want my own voice back, but I don't know if I ever will."

As a chronic headache sufferer, Colwill was diagnosed with hemiplegic migraines earlier this year, which causes the blood vessels in her brain to expand, resulting in stroke-like symptoms such as paralysis down one side of the body.

Her pain normally lasted for about seven days, but the frequency increased recently, reaching its peak last month, when she phoned for medical help.

After treatment, she was diagnosed as having FAS, a rare condition caused by strokes and where the part of her brain controlling speech and word formation became disordered.