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.
“I would say Afrikaans for the next century is a safe language. It is not only spoken in South Africa but it is spoken in Botswana and Namibia as well,” Bailey said.
She said Afrikaans was still used in South African academics, the arts and business, enabling the language to thrive and grow. According to Bailey, it is when a language is alienated from these areas that it could easily die.
“The pressure is to create space where people use the language; if not, it will start stagnating and it will die,” Bailey said.
The Afrikaans language has been widely associated with the apartheid system because of the Nationalist Party’s role in the architecture of the apartheid system. But Bailey said that just as the language was attached to bad figures in history, it was a language born on South African soil.
“It is a language that has an international footprint because of Dutch and English. It’s a diverse language that has roots in three different continents; it’s a special language,” she said.
Bailey stated that disregarding Afrikaans means disregarding its heritage and culture. She emphasised the importance of educating young people in their mother tongues to preserve indigenous languages.
There is still a debate in South Africa about whether Afrikaans is an indigenous language or not.
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).”
The Star