South African Hollywood star Charlize Theron has faced a mountain of criticism for suggesting that her mother tongue Afrikaans is "a dying language", news site Times Live reports. She made the comments on the SmartLess podcast (12 minutes in) when she was explaining that she grew up speaking only Afrikaans and then learned English when she was 19, which was why she speaks it with an American accent, she said. She added that Afrikaans was a "dying language" that was "not very helpful" and spoken by "about 44 people".
Some of the millions who do speak in South Africa were angered. Times Live quotes one critic saying "it's not dying... there are new songs and poems being written every day, movies made etc". Another Twitter commenter accused Theron that "forgot where she came from. I am Afrikaans and will never talk bad about my mother tongue language! it is a beautiful language! Lots of people wish they could speak or understand it." Afrikaans is highly politicized in South Africa.
The imposition of the language in schools was the main reason behind the 1976 Soweto uprising against the apartheid regime, in which at least 170 people were killed, mostly schoolchildren. It is the mother tongue of 13% of South Africans, mainly mixed-race people, known as colored, and white South Africans - the descendants of Dutch, German, and French settlers who arrived in the 17th Century.
