Vietnamese performers attend the Francophonie month event in Malaysia. (Photo: bernama.com)

From March 10, the annual event, held at a shopping complex in Kuala Lumpur, with the participation of Belgium, France, ‎Guinea, Laos, Mauritius, Morocco, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, ‎and Vietnam.

Attending the event, Bui Trong Vinh, a member of the Vietnamese Business Association in Malaysia, said that the event helped international friends know more about Vietnamese culture and cuisine.

He hoped that Vietnamese enterprises will have more opportunities to attend such an event to bring Vietnam closer to international friends.

Chargé d'Affaires of Ukraine in Malaysia Denys Mykhailyuk said that ‎the OIF's mission is to embody the active solidarity between its 54 members, seven associate members‎, and 27 observers, which have a population of 321 ‎million French speakers.‎ ‎

This international organisation of French-speaking countries represents one of the biggest linguistic ‎regions ‎in the world. Ukraine and Poland are observers in the OIF.‎

‎In Malaysia, thanks to the commitment of the Ministry of Education, acting in favour of ‎multilingualism, ‎the number of students learning French in government secondary schools has ‎tripled during the past 10 ‎years.

Today, French is taught in more than 130 public schools to 15,000 ‎students in the country and nearly 3,000 of them ‎sat last year for the official French exam called DELF scolaire ‎‎(which ranks Malaysia 6th in the world in ‎terms of the number of candidates).‎

In addition, since the ‎beginning of the 1990s, Malaysia's French language teachers have benefited from a ‎high-quality ‎training course, partly held in Besançon, France.