And on the issue of Gaelic, what's wrong with promoting and taking pride in your indigenous language? Why are you so ashamed of it?
I don't know the particular case of Gaelic, but know the ones of some french regional languages : provencal, savoyard...
They're wildly used in city signs, and sometimes even street signs, these days - halfway between seek of regional identity and eye-candy for tourists. But they are indeed very rarely spoken apart from a few elderlies, not to say written (even if there has been indeed literature in Provencal, mainly around Frederic Mistral, Nobel prize in literature 1904)... In France, the only
really spoken regional language I know is Basque (I mean, spoken by young people).
Actually, these languages have died from themselves for a very practical reason : the significant discrepancies between spoken languages from village to village, from valley to valley, made oral communication difficult when roads, coaches and trains began to make these places closer to each other.
These people had to unify their language, and due to what has been called
Linguistic imperialism, and that I personally consider as belonging to a progress, the french language was proposed (better to say imposed) as a much wider-based standard.
I think this may well be the main question of the original post :
we all need a common language.
Sharing that language, means it should at the same time keeped stable, but evolving - I still think the idea of an authority regulating language, in the sense of publishing an official reference about it (eg dictionaries, grammar books...), may be the least worst way to manage that.
No, I wouldn't give up french, because I feel that something as beautiful as what Proust or others have written shall not die - or at least, I don't want to be deprived of that.
But I'm glad to have learnt (even very imperfectly) english - the first reason here being it gives me access to a rather huge knowledge about photography, that we just don't have in french (I'm thinking to people from Ansel Adams to Norman Koren or the Steinmuellers, with many others of course, including Michael Reichmann and this forum).
The progress here would be, imho, that bilingualism becomes the norm.
As it's quite hard to teach to your children another language than your mother language, all the language that are reasonably widely spoken now will still be spoken - including national languages as french, or even some regional ones as the numerous german ones, but we will need a common world-spread language. Will it be english, or spanish, or hindi, or chinese, or icelandic? Wait and see...