My Gaelic professor for her summer fieldwork documented the death of a particular Scottish Gaelic dialect.
The Scottish Gaelic that is taught in school is standardized from Skye Gaelic. She was documenting the substantially different dialect spoken by isolated fishing villages on the east coast of Scotland. Those folks had been forcibly moved there at the time of the Highland Clearances to develop a fishing industry instead of tending sheep on the land from which they were removed . . .
It's very interesting, and it's sort of sad that a distinctive dialect is being lost, but on the other hand these people are no longer uprooted and isolated from the rest of the country. So on balance it's not something to decry.
OTOH, Scottish Gaelic as a whole is dying as an actual spoken language. The census shows more people speaking it (due to its being taught in school) but fewer and fewer of those are native speakers. They simply have a smattering (as I do myself). What my prof said was that if a language isn't spoken at the breakfast table, it dies.
"Yet the extinctions cannot be stopped, for the most part. Trying to teach people to speak their ancestral languages, for example, will almost never get far beyond the starting gate. Some years ago, I spent some weeks teaching Native Americans their ancestral language. To the extent that the exercise helped give them a feeling of connection to their ancestors, it was time well spent.
However, it was clear that there was no way that they would learn more than some words and expressions. Languages are hard to learn for adults, especially ones as different from English as Native American ones. In Pomo, the verb goes at the end of the sentence. There are sounds it's hard to make when you're not born to them. For busy people with jobs and families, how far were they ever going to be able to get mastering a language whose word for eye is ‘uyqh abe?"
I see this when I go to Ireland, The government has been trying to promote gaelic for years..with a notable lack of success.
It is an aesthetic shame that Gaelic in its several forms is not long for this world. It is one of a couple of languages that seem to have been designed for women's voices and is a delight for a man to listen to when spoken by women. Native speakers do not know that delight because they cannot hear the musical quality of their language; they hear only the meaning. Vietnamese is another such language and Cantonese, to a lesser extent.
American English is doomed.
;-)