Charlize Theron and English

Charlize Theron was born in South Africa, and Afrikaans is her first language. She has said that she spoke mostly Afrikaans at home as a child and had only limited English. When she moved to the United States at nineteen, she effectively had to learn to speak English fluently; she later explained that this helped her acquire an American accent. So “learned English as an adult” is approximate: she encountered the language earlier, while intensive fluency developed in her late teens.