Dina Lohan, the Merrick-based mother of actress and refugee activist Lindsay Lohan, says the accent her daughter displayed in a news clip that recently went viral is the result of Lindsay’s affinity for language.
“I have raised Lindsay and all my kids to constantly learn different languages and embrace different cultures,” Dina Lohan, 54, told Us Weekly over the weekend. “Since Lindsay was a kid, she was speaking fluent Italian because my mother is Italian and would only speak to her in Italian. She taught herself how to speak French, Arabic, Greek, Hebrew and the list goes on. Lindsay has a very high IQ and is very intelligent and can pick up on any languages in a minute. She has that gift.”
She recalled her daughter learning to speak in accents as a child star. “Remember when Lindsay was just a little kid doing [the 1998 family comedy] ‘The Parent Trap’ and she was able to rock that British accent because she was so fascinated with the British culture — and still is — and embraced it fully?” Dina Lohan told Us.
The London-based Lindsay, 30, said last week that in the clip from the Oct. 15 opening of Lohan, an Athens nightclub in which she is a partner with Greek restaurateur Dennis Papageorgiou, her accent is “a mixture of most of the languages I can understand or am trying to learn,” adding, “I’ve been learning different languages since I was a child. I’m fluent in English and French, can understand Russian and am learning Turkish, Italian and Arabic.”
This has proved helpful, said her mother, in Lindsay’s activism, through which the “Mean Girls” star has helped draw attention to child trafficking, with the 2010 BBC documentary “Lindsay Lohan’s Indian Journey,” and recently traveled to Turkey to help keep focus on the Syrian refugee crisis. Dina Lohan praised her daughter’s efforts “to learn other peoples’ languages in order to communicate with them and help them embrace who they are. Lindsay wants to feel what these kids overseas are saying and going through and not someone else’s interpretation of what they are saying, and I think people can learn from her.”
Lindsay had tweeted on Friday, “Should we make Tshirts about my new accent, donate [money] to charity. Turn silly to something positive for the [world]?”
