Moderator:Aurinĭa
boerboel wrote:OK, after some additional searching, I've found videos of her speaking Afrikaans. It strikes me as somewhat odd that her facebook is entirely in English. Hopefully, she's not following the Charlize Theron school of thought where one has to distance oneself from Afrikaans heritage and speaking the language in order to be a success...
Agreed with regards to Charlize being a sellout. Without actually knowing her background, one would never guess her native language was Afrikaans or that she's even from SA. Given her profession, perhaps she felt it necessary to lose her accent and distance herself from her cultural heritage in order to get movie roles. I'm not really familiar with her work with the UN or what types of statements she's made regarding Africa, but I just get this vibe from her that she's not really "proud" of her heritage, which is a shame, if true.
It does make sense that these international pageants and the contestants would primarily use English, especially publicly. I was just surprised to find at first only English results, especially on her personal facebook page. However, once I dug a little deeper, I did find several instances of her speaking Afrikaans.
Bittereinder wrote:It's unfortunate, but she's also representing the whole of South Africa. English is the only language the speakers of all 11 languages can understand and [hopefully] speak. Speaking English is not as unnatural as one might imagine. English is a compulsory additional language throughout school and is used predominantly in the corporate world. For a university student like herself there's often only English textbooks available for most of her modules. I'm studying IT and I've only had a few Afrikaans textbooks. So it might just be about pragmatism for her personally. If you travel here you're bound to regularly switch from your native tongue to English regularly.
Weerwolf wrote:The problem with Charlize is methinks not her speaking more English than Afrikaans, but that she’s abandoned her roots and has apperantly changed her identity. She could have been the international voice of unheard South African problems, raising public awareness of plaasmoorde, but fame and glitter comes first. Being in Holywood she has to weigh her words, because one wrong word could make the owners of the business angry and she would be then booking her flight back home.
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