Just recently, actress Charlize Theron provoked great controversy when she said during an interview that Afrikaans is a dying language spoken by just a few people.
Ordinarily, those would never have had any impact on social media or elsewhere. But when you realize that the person who made that statement is a famous actress and one of the highest paid in the industry, then you realize the impact her words had and why many rebuked her and provided data to refute her claims.
Worlddata.Info indicates that about 8.4 million people worldwide speak Afrikaans as their mother tongue.
Charlize Theron is a South African actress, but she is more famous in the film industry in America (Hollywood) than she is in the industry back home.
Well, as someone pointed out, just because the claim (about Afrikaans being a dying language and spoken by very few people) was made by a famous Hollywood actress does not make it true.
Despite the controversy her initial statement elicited, some Twitter users claim it may have been an indirect call to her people to ensure that the Afrikaans language doesn’t die.
Either way, those who had tackled her at the outset over her statement can now keep quiet as new data shows that she wasn’t right after all.
