Charlize Theron slammed for “Anti – Afrikaans” comments

Lobby group AfriForum has slammed South African Hollywood star Charlize Theron for her controversial views on the Afrikaans language and her identity as a descendent of the Afrikaner people.

This comes after Theron, in a recent interview, told the hosts of a popular podcast show that she found Afrikaans to be a dying and unhelpful language, with only 44 people in South Africa still using the dialect.

Theron told the hosts that while in South Africa, she did not speak English because her entire neighbourhood was Afrikaans-speaking.

The Oscar-winning actress has ruffled some feathers with her “anti-Afrikaans comments”.

AfriForum’s head of cultural affairs, Alana Bailey, said Theron was far from correct in her views. Bailey said more than 6 million people in South Africa spoke Afrikaans.

Wikipedia notes that: “About 13.5% of the South African population (7 million people) speak Afrikaans as a first language, making it the third most common natively-spoken language in the country, after Zulu and Xhosa. It has the widest geographic and racial distribution of the 11 official languages and is widely spoken and understood as a second or third language, although Zulu and English are estimated to be understood as a second language by a much larger proportion of the population.

“It is the majority language of the western half of South Africa – the provinces of the Northern Cape and Western Cape – and the first language of 75.8% of coloured South Africans (4.8 million people), 60.8% of white South Africans (2.7 million people), 1.5% of black South Africans (600 000 people), and 4.6% of Indian South Africans (58 000 people).”