Charlize Theron, a South African-American actress and producer, has mocked her mother tongue on a celebrity podcast, saying “Afrikaans is unhelpful”.
Born and bred in Benoni on the east of Johannesburg in 1975, Theron is of rich Afrikaans descent and her uncle, Danie Theron, was a military leader during the second Boer War.
During her appearance on SmartLess podcast, the seasoned global movie star addressed the topic of mother tongue. Theron, who spoke Afrikaans for the first 19 years of her life, shared that she only properly learned how to speak English when she moved to the US.
“That’s why it was easy for me to drop the South African accent, because I was really learning English from scratch,’’ she said on the podcast, explaining that because no one spoke English in her neighbourhood, she considered Afrikaans as her home language.
The co-hosts on the podcast, Will Arnett and Jason Bateman, attempted their own South African accents, to which Theron said they were terrible, noting: “Broer, ons moet aan dit werk [Brother, we need to work on that],” before dropping her own controversial take.
She also joked that “about 44 people still speak Afrikaans” and labelled the language as an “unhelpful language”.
Although her remarks were made in jest, many Afrikaners and social media users have taken offence.
Previously, Theron’s non-regional accent was applauded worldwide, her red-carpet interviews were timeously done in Afrikaans, and she did not seem ready to turn her back on the dialect.
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