"By the 1990s Afrikaans was no longer the instrument of a chauvinistic Afrikaner nationalism. Afrikaner historians had begun to stress the multifaceted nature of our history, Afrikaans as a medium of instruction was no longer imposed on black schools and the language had been scaled back drastically on state radio and television. But [it could be celebrated that] Afrikaans, along with only three others (Hebrew, Indonesian and Hindi) were the only languages that in the course of the twentieth century made the transition from a low status, spoken language to a language used in all walks of public life, including literature, science and technology."