Secondary language of ASEAN

Article 34 of the ASEAN Charter explicitly designates English as the sole working language of the organization. However, there are some advocacy for the expansion of another language within the region that could work as a secondary language. One prevalent revisited proposal is for the promotion of the Malay language (or its variants) as an official ASEAN lingua-franca. In 2022, Ismail Sabri Yaakob, then Prime Minister of Malaysia, proposed the use of Bahasa Melayu as ASEAN's second language. Ismail Sabri Yaakob said Malaysia and Indonesia will continue to make efforts to uplift the status of Bahasa Melayu, which may become an ASEAN language one day.

The Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (DBP) Board of Governors chairman, Dr. Awang Sariyan, remarked that the agreement reached by Malaysia and Indonesia to continue to work together to uplift the status of Bahasa Melayu will increase the chance of it being adopted as an ASEAN and international language, because Bahasa Melayu (which has about 300 million speakers) is also used in Indonesia, Brunei, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Myanmar and Timor Leste, while efforts to make Bahasa Melayu as the official language of ASEAN required strong support from all Malay-speaking countries.

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