On a spring evening in Budapest, I watched the Kodaly Choir of Debrecen close a program of Asian voices with a song from a place few in the hall could have found on a map. “Karimatanu Kuichaa,” in Ko Matsushita’s choral setting, is a festival song from Miyako, one of the small islands strung between Japan and Taiwan. It was sung by a Hungarian choir under a Taiwanese conductor, SzuYun Swing Hsieh.
The languages of those southern islands — Miyako, Yaeyama, Yonaguni and Okinawan — are not dialects of Japanese but distinct tongues, each listed by as endangered. I left thinking the evening had posed a question rather than offered a concert: What does a state do with the languages of the peoples inside it? Gather them up or weed them out?
I did not expect that question to reappear weeks later at the center of European diplomacy. Last week, it did.
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