My favorite word? Accoontable.
Not a’ tall, not a’ tall.
Because everyone speaks English, more or less. By speaking to someone in Welsh, if they don’t speak Welsh you put them in the situation of having to go on the back foot, and apologise for not knowing something. It’s kind of exclusionary and rude.
An imperfect analogy. Suppose I’m a Harvard graduate. I could just assume that people went to Harvard, and say things like "don’t you remember prof x’… but if it turns out (as it usually will) that they didn’t go to Harvard, it puts them on the back foot trying to explain that, and (rightly) makes me look like an elitist douche.
Language and politeness are about trying to communicate with someone else as best you can. Speaking in a language only some speak, rather than the one everybody speaks, is rude. Unless, that is, you know they also speak the minority language.
pdts
One hopes this is a spoof. But one fears that it is not.
Full Disclosure: I don’t know if you’ll count me as “Irish” having been born in the US.
I would love to see any of you go up to Newry and tell one of my cousins that they are “British”. No, wait a sec, let me make popcorn first. . . 
My people are from just above the line in NI. My close cousins (means close in age more than genetically, an excellent example of language and culture btw.) speak only a little Irish, although I have prodded them into taking it up again. (Or maybe embarassed them into it!) My younger cousins, say 5-20 years of age are nearly fluent, and greatly enjoy having a “secret” language to use in front of their parents.
There can be no question, that although I’ve proven a very poor student, I’ve learned more about the “Irish” way of thinking and being from studying the language than I did from years of studying history and literature.
The only greater souce of understanding has been Sean Nos music. But very few cultures are lucky enough to have sucha rich oral tradition available to them.
As to the OP, “Tir gan teanga, Tir gan Anam.” A country without it’s language is a country without it’s soul. There’s a mulitude of reasons why usurpers always force their language upon the people they enslave; none of them have to do with preserving local culture.
So the US doesn’t have a soul? We have no official languages.
One of the most important things that the Office québécois de la langue française does is to propose French words for various innovations as soon as possible after the thing comes into use.
Contrary to the image of fighting losing battles over le hambourgeois and other things that have been around forever, that’s the largest part of its terminology work, and it’s very important (IMHO) because it firmly establishes that advanced technology and cultural innovation can easily be discussed in French. (When you have to improvise an English borrowing every two seconds, you reinforce the idea that this subject would be more easily talked about in English).
It does, in fact, work – the word courriel is much more commonly used, certainly in business and government, but also in common speech, than the word mail commonly used in France, for example. It’s to the point where the government of France frequently officially adopts terms that the OQLF created across the ocean.
For more on this subject, check out the last few chapters of The Story of French by Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow.
Our official language currently is English.
But I’d give the example of a friend of mine who is Cherokee. He said he always thought his Grandfather was a bit of a loon, until he learned the Cherokee language. He said he was unable to think in the same way his Grandfather did until he learned it. Then he realized he’d been holding contempt for the wisest man he’d ever known. I think he’d agree that he got his soul back by learning his language. ::toddles off to find his phone number::
Although I understand the sentiment of “Tír gan teanga, Tír gan Anam” or “Is fearr Gaeilge briste na Béarla cliste” ('tis better to speak broken Irish than for English to be heard") the fact is that for much of the current population of the island of Ireland English is their mother tongue going back generations. It is unfortunate that the Gaeltachtaí have contracted and may cease to exist in our lifetimes but I don’t think Gaeilge should be hoist on all and sundry anymore. The in-roads made by Gaeilge in Northern Ireland are heartening in a way but are in the context of very deliberate oppositional cultural politics. I don’t fault anyone for wanting to learn and speak Irish, as I myself do but I’m not sure it should be the National language anymore, nor a compulsory subject in schools. Apart from anything else, compulsory Irish education has done nothing to arrest the contraction of native speakers.
No, it isn’t.
English is the official language of about half of the states, but there is no official national language. English is just the one we use.
Furthermore, the Irish have made English their own. Irish literature yadda yadda.
Bah. Other than Shaw, Joyce, Yeats, Wilde and Swift you’ve got nothing. Nothing!
Beckett, Behan, Heaney, Kavanagh, yeah you’re right.
I’m not sure where “soul” crept in, and I’m not certain this is a serious question but I’ll give it a try. America does not have a single culture, but several. There is no monoculture embraced or expressed by every single American. But Americans certainly have language-born cultures, as expressed by American English, various creole languages, dialects, and indeed Cherokee and whatnot. If you think about it, your particular American English dialect probably shapes your particular cultural framework more that you realize.
I think this is totally false. Of course there is cultural variation in the US (there is cultural variation in every country), but there is a very distinct American culture.
If you are American, have you spent much time (more than a month at a time) outside the US? If not, you may bee too insular or not have the necessary perspective to see how distinct American culture is.
pdts
I agree that “foisting” is never constructive. I also am not recommending the dropping of the English language. I would just like to see us (if I may be allowed to include myself and my child) learning and using both. There will always be those to whom one or the other feels more comfortable - so be it. But we have to get away from this attitude that the speaking of Irish is somehow politically subversive or indicative of (or causative of) a poverty-stricken background.
I can add another reason why: poetry and literature.
Many years ago - more than I like to acknowledge - I attended a lecture on Dante’s Divine Comedy, given by a pair of Romance Language scholars from the University of North Carolina. Of course, they lectured in English, but they gave and explained examples of Dante’s literary skills in the original Italian. They showed that there are levels of subtlety in the work that are not accessible to those reading it in translation.
That of course can be generalized to all languages. Hell, many anglophones “don’t get” Shakespeare, just because he wrote in an archaic dialect of English. Imagine what you’re missing reading, say, Pushkin, in translation.
With regard to your last comment I read recently that Ireland’s Gaeilgóirí outside the Gaeltachtaí are by and large part of the élite of this country. That is fluency in Irish indicates you are richer and better educated than solely Anglophone Irish people.
People say similar things in Wales-- that the Taffia is taking over.
pdts