South African actress Charlize Theron has opened up about her Afrikaans background in the latest episode of the “Smartless” podcast.
The starlet, a descendant of Second Boer War military leader Danie Theron, was born in Benoni and raised in South Africa before moving to Hollywood.
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In the interview, hosted by Sean Hayes, Jason Bateman and Will Arnett, Theron said that she had only learned to speak English fluently after leaving South Africa and spoke Afrikaans exclusively until she was around 19-years-old.
Arnett then tries speaking in a “terrible” South African accent, to which Theron quips, “Broer, ons moet aan dit werk”, as the panel agrees that nailing a South African accent is challenging.
The Oscar winner then elaborates, saying that, growing up, nobody spoke English in her neighbourhood and that she only took it as a second language at school.
As a result, it wasn’t until she left the country that she started focusing on speaking English.
“That’s why it was easy for me to drop the [SA] accent because I was really learning English from scratch,” she explained.
Bateman admits that he never knew that Afrikaans was a “completely different language”, Theron says: “There’s about 44 people still speaking it. It’s definitely a dying language; it’s not a very helpful language.”
Hours later, in response to a snippet of the interview posted on Instagram, South African actor and producer, Tim Theron commented: “As South Africans, we’re extremely proud of Charlize and everything she has achieved…but we’re also very proud of our diversity and our amazing and beautiful official languages, of which Afrikaans is one. It’s not a ‘dying language’, and it’s not only spoken by 44 people. It’s spoken by millions of people; there are new songs and poems being written every day, movies made etc. It’s a language with its roots in several languages and cultures, including Dutch, Malay, Indonesian and our indigenous San languages. Just FYI.”
Listen to the full interview HERE.
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Picture: Cape{town}Etc Library