Learning a Language Not Spoken by a Community

I was reading today about Irish or Gaelic which is an endangered language (yes, I realize that the story came up because it’s St. Patrick’s day). It struck me that it is a somewhat different bilingual situation from that which we find here in the U.S.– although it might be parallel to taking a foreign language in high school or college. What’s different here is that Irish is required in the Irish school system and that it is Ireland’s official language. Yet, there are fewer and fewer people who speak it.