Africa-Press – Seychelles. The claim sparked a social media firestorm, with users pointing out in the comments, hundreds of which were written in – surprise, surprise – Afrikaans, how the actress couldn’t have been more wrong.
Afrikaans is a “dying” and “not very helpful” language, Charlize Theron, a South African-American actress born in Benoni, Transvaal, said about her mother tongue Afrikaans in a new SmartLess podcast with Sean Hayes, Jason Bateman, and Will Arnett. According to Theron, who shared her story of learning English after coming to the US, she “didn’t speak English” until she was around 19 years old.
Despite English, alongside Afrikaans and nine others, being an official language in South Africa, the actress says that as a child, she didn’t consider it her native tongue, as people in her neighborhood simply didn’t speak it. She says she learned English at school, but only spoke it fluently after she moved to the US.
Meanwhile, the actress’ remarks that Afrikaans is dying triggered a storm of indignation on social media. In fact, Afrikaans, a member of the Germanic language group, is spoken by some seven million people of different races in South Africa.
Regarding the actress’ connections with Afrikaans, her great-great-uncle, Danie Theron, is known to have been a Boer military leader and a hero in the Second Boer War against the British.
Boers, the sub-ethnic group he belonged to, are Afrikaners by nationality and the word itself is translated from Afrikaans as “peasants,” which reflects the fact that most Boers live in rural areas and work in agriculture.
Some sources also say that Charlize Theron’s ancestors were Huguenots in South Africa – French Protestants who fled the French Catholic government in the 16th and 17th centuries due to persecution and violence.
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