Searching for A Shared Identity: My Follow Up on “Does ASEAN Need A Second Language?”
Earlier this month, the public in Indonesia and Malaysia were immersed with a big conversation regarding the Malaysian Government’s initiative to better promote Malay Language (Standard Malay) to become ASEAN’s Second Official Language.
This issue became big since language is vital to everyone’s life and it’s about a language for a regional organization, the ASEAN, which the impact can be supranational. People started making variety of arguments and responds, be it to support or to reject the proposal and even went further to showcase what language better than the other, because language is their “thing” (read: they use it everyday), thus they have a sense of ownership to it.
As an owner, of course, you can have a say towards your thing.
As part of ASEAN citizens, I also used my right to response to this issue. Several weeks ago, I crafted an article asking about “why does ASEAN need a second language?” at this very current regional and global context. As a citizen, I see that ASEAN is working “fine” with the current language policy (using English as the official language) and seeing current “inconduciveness” in some ASEAN countries which I think it’s needed to get regional response, I just found out that the urgency of this proposal is a bit blurry.
However, I think it’s also worth it and wise to discuss about the need of ASEAN to have a second language which is coming from it’s own local language, by not only seeing the factual urgency, but also seeing it’s idealistic goal. Yes, it would be something quite far ahead, but it’s also something nice to have for ASEAN. At least, that’s what I learned lately.
Long story short, several weeks ago when the issue was still warm, I joined a webinar held by Duta Bahasa DKI Jakarta discussing about the growing issue. One of the speakers, Mrs. Luh Anik Mayani (The Director of SEAMEO QITEP In Language), gave explanation that somehow successfully shooting to my basic question “does ASEAN need a second official language?”.
She brought to the table about the urgency of ASEAN to have the so-called “ASEAN’s Collective Identity”. According to her, the need of building and instilling the spirit of “ASEAN-ness” to all of its citizens is important as it would be the building factor for a united and strong ASEAN as a regional institution.
Listening to her explanation, I just did a self-asking “how would we identify ourselves as ASEAN citizens?”. I think as ASEAN citizens, we rarely talk about it and the answer to that question is currently quite difficult to find. Thus, I think it’s quite making sense for ASEAN as a regional institution to put particular efforts to build a shared identity to strengthen and seal the bond of ASEAN people. It would mean a lot to expand and tighten the current and future of states’ and, even, people to people cooperation in ASEAN.
Searching more, I also found out that the effort to build “ASEAN Identity” has been seriously discussed during some ASEAN Summits. During the 37th ASEAN Summit, for example, the ASEAN countries even agreed to adopt the “Narrative of ASEAN Identity” which explains in detail about the urgency and how this shared identity would be making impact for ASEAN.
Back in 2015, ASEAN has also declared its slogan to have “One Vision, One Identity, and One Community”. It’s part of the institution response to the increasing global challenge which demand strong cohesiveness from ASEAN countries in order to be able to deal with it. It’s an effort to build an internal strength within ASEAN to create outstanding collaborations.
Further, Mayani also stated some tangible benefits of adopting a local ASEAN language as this regional institution’s official/working language. Some of them are: expanding and strengthening cross-cultural understanding and opening better career development opportunities for ASEAN citizens. Imagine how if a young professional from Vietnam can have more options whether he/she wants to work in Vietnam or in other ASEAN countries because he/she is able to use the ASEAN’s official language. That would be amazing!
After all, I agree that having a shared identity, such as one common language, is valuable to ASEAN. But, I can say that the process of choosing what language is compatible for this matter or, generally, how ASEAN would choose its language would be demanding a strong commitment from each of ASEAN individual countries. The process might be uneasy because we talk about building an identity here. But, that’s what making shared identity valuable when it’s concluded.