ASEAN Society Philippines

ASEAN Society Philippines Official page of the ASEAN Society in the Philippines. Be part of an advocacy that matters!

The ASEAN Society Philippines (ASP)

Founded in 207, ASP is a private sector-led organization that aims to support national efforts to ensure that the benefits of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Integration are made known and reaped by every citizen. Our Mission:
We believe in ASEAN as a region of growth and development as embodied in its aspiration for One Vision, One Identity, One Community. The ASEAN Society commits to raising awareness and promoting greater understanding among national entities across sectors, and through the Society’s activities, assist in the endeavor to strengthen the foundation for a prosperous and peaceful community of Southeast Asian Nations.

All through August we followed words that crossed the sea: salamat from Arabic, g**o from Sanskrit, pansit from Hokkien,...
27/08/2026

All through August we followed words that crossed the sea: salamat from Arabic, g**o from Sanskrit, pansit from Hokkien, and the words we inherited alongside Malaysia, Indonesia and Timor-Leste from a common ancestor.

This is what it means to observe Buwan ng Wika and Buwan ng Kasaysayan in the same month. Language is the oldest archive we have. Every borrowed word is evidence of an encounter — the trader who docked, the teacher who arrived, the family who stayed.

When Narciso Ramos signed in Bangkok in 1967, he was not creating a new relationship. He was giving an institution to something that had lived on our tongues for centuries.

One document then. Eleven countries now. And between the two, thousands of words that crossed the sea without asking anyone's permission.

Sources:
https://www.officialgazette.gov.ph/1997/07/15/proklamasyon-blg-1041-s-1997-2/
https://nhcp.gov.ph/news_and_updates/nhcp-leads-history-month-celebration-in-august-2025/
https://asean.org/asean-chairmanship-2026-philippines/
https://www.pna.gov.ph/index.php/articles/1266472

Bagoong in the Philippines. Belacan in Malaysia. Terasi in Indonesia. Prahok in Cambodia. Padaek in Laos. Pla ra and kap...
25/08/2026

Bagoong in the Philippines. Belacan in Malaysia. Terasi in Indonesia. Prahok in Cambodia. Padaek in Laos. Pla ra and kapi in Thailand. Mắm in Viet Nam. Ngapi in Myanmar.

The method differs, the fish differs, the taste differs — but the idea is one. Fish, salt, time.

It left a mark on language too. The Burmese ngapi literally means pressed fish, and Thai, Lao and Khmer borrowed it as kapi — though in those languages it came to mean shrimp paste rather than fish.

As the Thailand Foundation puts it, these ingredients are not the creation of any single country or people. They are the product of a shared Southeast Asian culture and a shared wisdom about preserving food.

Sources:
https://thailandfoundation.or.th/pla-ra-thai-fermented-fish/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ngapi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padaek
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prahok
https://www.bernama.com/en/news.php/news.php?id=2379284

Long before English, Southeast Asia already had a common language.Malay was in use in the kingdom of Srivijaya from the ...
21/08/2026

Long before English, Southeast Asia already had a common language.

Malay was in use in the kingdom of Srivijaya from the seventh century. When Melaka rose in the fifteenth, Malay became the full lingua franca of maritime Southeast Asia — and never merely a market language. It served the courts, the literature, and the correspondence between kings and foreign powers alike.

For the Philippines, Malay was the bridge. The Arabic behind salamat, the Sanskrit behind g**o, the Persian words we still use — almost all of it passed through Malay ports before crossing our seas.

It never became our language. It became our route.

Sources:
https://en.unesco.org/silkroad/knowledge-bank/foreign-documents-and-descriptions-melaka-between-ad-1505-1511
https://es.unesco.org/silkroad/node/8878
https://www.sabrizain.org/malaya/library/linguafranca.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malacca_Sultanate

The susi in your door. The hikaw in your ear. The pansit at the party. The toyo on the table.All of them Hokkien. Lingui...
19/08/2026

The susi in your door. The hikaw in your ear. The pansit at the party. The toyo on the table.

All of them Hokkien. Linguists have traced 163 Hokkien-derived words in Tagalog alone.

Most of them do not appear in the earliest Spanish dictionaries of Tagalog, which means they are relatively recent arrivals. They came with migrants from Fujian and Guangdong, at a time when Manila had become a busy international port in the galleon trade. They brought their trades, their cooking and their words.

This did not happen to us alone. The same Hokkien roots surface in Malay and Indonesian. Indonesia has lumpia too. It has bakmi and tauge.

The ports of Southeast Asia shared a commercial vocabulary long before the region shared a single market.

Sources:
https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/server/api/core/bitstreams/d812ec81-9543-47a3-9474-9f41cc0e298a/content
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_loanwords_in_Tagalog

G**o. Diwata. Mukha. Dukha.Four words Filipinos use without thinking. Four words from Sanskrit — guru, devata, mukha, an...
13/08/2026

G**o. Diwata. Mukha. Dukha.

Four words Filipinos use without thinking. Four words from Sanskrit — guru, devata, mukha, and duḥkha, the word for suffering.

India never colonized us. Over many centuries, Indic vocabulary spread across Southeast Asia through trade, religion and literature, passing through Malay and Old Javanese before reaching our shores.

Which is why traces of Sanskrit turn up in Thai, in Khmer, in Lao, in Indonesian and in Filipino. Not because these languages are related to one another, but because the same tide of exchange washed over all of them.

Say g**o in Jakarta. Or in Bangkok. Someone will know what you mean.

Source:
https://www.wisdomlib.org/history/essay/indian-influences-in-the-philippines/d/doc1474048.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_loanwords_in_Tagalog

In the Philippines, salamat means thank you.In Malaysia and Indonesia, selamat means safety and wellbeing — selamat pagi...
11/08/2026

In the Philippines, salamat means thank you.

In Malaysia and Indonesia, selamat means safety and wellbeing — selamat pagi, selamat jalan, selamat ulang tahun.

They come from the same place. The Arabic salāmāt is the plural of salāmah: good health, wellbeing, safety. It did not arrive here directly from Arabia. It travelled through Malay, the language of trade in our seas, before it settled on our tongues.

In Malay the original sense survived. In Filipino, the meaning drifted toward gratitude instead.

This is how language moves. A word passes through a port, changes what it means, and centuries later feels as though it had been ours from the beginning.

Sources:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/salamat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_loanwords_in_Tagalog

A very happy birthday to ASP’s Chair, Amb. Delia Albert!
11/08/2026

A very happy birthday to ASP’s Chair, Amb. Delia Albert!

Two days until ASEAN Day.There are eleven of us now — Timor-Leste acceded on 26 October 2025. Eleven countries, and well...
06/08/2026

Two days until ASEAN Day.

There are eleven of us now — Timor-Leste acceded on 26 October 2025. Eleven countries, and well over a thousand languages between them.

Some of them are close cousins. The terima kasih of Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia is audibly a relative of our salamat. Others come from an entirely different linguistic world: the khop khun of Thailand, the cảm ơn of Viet Nam.

That is what this region actually is. Not one language broken into pieces, but many languages that learned to understand one another across centuries of trade, travel and living side by side.

Sources:
https://asean.org/the-founding-of-asean/
https://asean.org/asean-chairmanship-2026-philippines/

Count to five in Filipino: isa, dalawa, tatlo, apat, lima.Now count in Malay. In Indonesian. In Tetum, spoken in Timor-L...
04/08/2026

Count to five in Filipino: isa, dalawa, tatlo, apat, lima.

Now count in Malay. In Indonesian. In Tetum, spoken in Timor-Leste.

Still lima.

This is not a coincidence, and it is not borrowing either. More than four thousand years ago, a family of languages began spreading from Taiwan into the islands of Southeast Asia. Linguists call it Austronesian. Tagalog, Cebuano and Ilocano descend from it — and so do Malay, Indonesian, Javanese and Tetum. When a Filipino says mata, it is understood in Kuala Lumpur, in Jakarta and in Dili. That word was never borrowed. All of us inherited it.

Not all of ASEAN, though. Thai, Lao, Khmer, Vietnamese and Burmese come from entirely different language families. What connects us to them is not ancestry but centuries of trade — and that is where the rest of this month goes.

Sources:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Austronesian-languages/Classification-and-prehistory

In 1976, in Bali, the leaders of Southeast Asia signed a promise to one another: the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation.Its...
28/07/2026

In 1976, in Bali, the leaders of Southeast Asia signed a promise to one another: the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation.

Its principles are deceptively simple — mutual respect, non-interference, and the peaceful settlement of disagreements. But those few ideas became the bedrock of how the region has kept the peace for half a century. In 2026 the treaty turns 50 — and the Philippines is helping lead the commemoration.

The Philippines’ fingerprints are on the treaty’s story. When the region wanted to open it to friends beyond Southeast Asia, it was amended in Manila in 1987 — turning a regional pact into a framework that dozens of countries around the world have since signed onto.

Sources:
https://www.rappler.com/newsbreak/iq/177305-timeline-asean-50-years-timeline-agreements-challenges/
https://aseminfoboard.org/community/philippines-2026-asean-chairmanship/

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