Timor-Leste is the only sovereign state in Asia with Portuguese as an official language (excluding Macau which is an autonomous region of China).

[4] This was despite the fact that the 'People's Assembly', which petitioned President Suharto for integration with Indonesia, conducted its proceedings in Portuguese, under a banner reading Integração de Timor Timur na República da Indonésia (Integration of East Timor into the Republic of Indonesia).

[8] Timor-Leste asked for help from Brazil, Portugal, and the Latin Union to spread the teaching of the language, although its prominence in official and public spheres has been met with some hostility from younger Indonesian-educated East Timorese.

[9] Nevertheless, the late Sérgio Vieira de Mello, who headed the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor, was a Brazilian who not only established a close working relationship with Xanana Gusmão (the country's first president) as a fellow Portuguese-speaker, but was respected by many East Timorese because of his efforts to learn Tetum.

At the level of phonology, there are phenomena of metathesis, denasalization, resyllabification and variation in the realization of palatal consonants, such as /ʃ/ > pronounced as [sʲ] or [s]: Ex.

[12] Timor-Leste uses the standard European Portuguese (português-padrão) spelling patterns: which is used by Portugal, PALOP and Macau.