The common language in India has been English since the 1830s. Before that it was Farsi. (Persian)
The US is headed toward Babel with Mexicans leading the charge.
They’re lucky to have English!
I think Ireland was crazy to resurrect Gaelic.
In the Austrian empire, Joseph II, an 18th-century “enlightened despot,” replaced Latin with German in the 1780’s (because he was a modernizer and thought the Germans were the most advanced nationality in the empire), although Latin was still used in the Hungarian part until the 1840s.
At which point the Hungarians, realizing that their language was difficult to learn, replaced Latin with Hungarian to keep Germans from other parts of the empire out of the gov’t jobs.
Overall in the empire, the dropping of Latin for a modern language of a particular ethnic group, made the other ethnic groups more aware of being different, and led to much greater conflict.
I was told that the initial plan was to replace English with Hindi after 15 years (after independence) but the people in southern India who speak one of the Dravidian languages objected to Hindi (an Indo-European language) and preferred English.