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 ¡ª Miyako, Yaeyama, Yonaguni and Okinawan ¡ª 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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