A 44-year-old janitor in Turkey, a monolingual native Turkish speaker, was humiliated by her supervisor at work. Her first symptom was silence. "I was unable to reply and felt intense anger towards her," she later told doctors. When her speech came back, it came back altered. She was now speaking Turkish with accents that listeners identified as Russian, Kurdish and Azerbaijani, shifting spontaneously among all three, in languages she had never learned.
Two months later, a 34-year-old widow arrived at an outpatient clinic with a similar story. After her family lost property to a brother-in-law's debt, she too went mute, and then began speaking with Russian and Kurdish accents.
