Latin is not a good comparison in this case. Latin is a dead language, but it never died. It slowly evolved into Late Latin, then Proto-Romance, then free of t

Latin is not a good comparison in this case. Latin is a dead language, but it never died. It slowly evolved into Late Latin, then Proto-Romance, then free of the unifying influence of the Roman Empire the languages started becoming mutually unintelligible across long distances and evolved into their own things, eventually becoming Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, Occitan etc... I over-simplify of course, but that's the idea. At no point was Latin replaced by anything else. If you had a time machine and went to Rome, then started to slowly rewind back in time you'd slowly see the language morphing back into Latin. If you did that in Paris, you'd hear the same thing[1]. On top of that Latin was the lingua franca for science and arts for over a thousand years. Through that route many words were loaned back into other languages, sometimes forming doublets of words having a different meaning but coming from the same Latin word through different routes. Take English "chair", coming from Latin "cathedra" (seat) through Old French and "cathedral" coming from... the same word, also through Old French but this time taking a detour through the ecclesiastic language. Gaelic's situation is utterly different. It hasn't evolved organically into a different language that eventually became different enough as to be mutually unintelligible, instead it's being replaced. It also has very little chance to survive as a lingua franca like Latin because the language that replaces it already does that better too. It's not a high prestige language that's used by many 2nd language speakers like Latin was and English is. [1] As a side note, that's why I can't stand ultra-prescriptivists. When a fellow French speaker starts harping on about how the "kids can't speak right" and the usual reactionary crap I usually ask them why they feel that way when they speak such a broken mess of a low dialect of Latin themselves. I mean if it doesn't have ablatives and deponent verbs it's not a real language as far as I'm concerned.