There has been considerable debate in ours Letters Pages about the state of the Gaelic language, fuelled by a warning issued last month by a Holyrood committee.

Read our report here 👈

That prompted a letter from a reader who said taxpayers’ money should not be used to promote “a dead language”.

Read that letter here 👈

Today, however, a correspondent who is Italian and learning Gaelic, has some harsh words for the monolingual.

Riccardo Robecchi of Glasgow writes:

"I have read the heated exchanges in your columns on the topic of Gaelic (Letters, July 25, 30 and August 1) and I feel like the debate is not well set: some people do not know what learning and speaking languages other than English means. Because I think that is exactly the issue: too many people who are against Gaelic only speak English.

I am Italian and learning other languages has incredibly enriched my understanding of my native tongue. After moving to Scotland I decided to start learning Gaelic, one of the very few Celtic languages surviving the Roman Empire. That of Gaelic is therefore a frail heritage which is once more endangered by an imperialistic attitude.

English is, and will be for the foreseeable future, Scotland's main language. In time it has become entrenched in the Scottish culture, thanks to political alliances and forced assimilation. This is not new, nor unique to Scotland: my own language would have been Milanese, a language related but not mutually intelligible with Italian, had it not been wiped out almost completely because it was a supposedly 'inferior' language nobody spoke any more.

And yet, losing that language means losing a heritage that lasted over a thousand years, a bit of my identity, and a way of thinking and seeing the world, too. That heritage is now almost completely lost: once the last few native speakers die, it will be gone, and the world will be poorer for it. The same should not happen to Gaelic.

I recently had a heated discussion with an acquaintance of mine. He repeated all the usual talking points against Gaelic, including that you could instead learn another, more useful language. Funnily enough, he is an English monolingual who has never done so. It's a condition which seems to be rife among those opposed to Gaelic: they only speak English and see no point in learning another language. The reality is that they feel scared and uncomfortable. But trying to suppress Gaelic won't change this, and by not taking the challenge of learning languages, these people are losing out on a wider, deeper understanding of the world, which includes their own language: English.

In his letter (July 25), Stan Hogarth says that by learning Gaelic 'we'd be speaking to ourselves, again'. But those who are against Gaelic appear to do exactly that: just speak to themselves, without ever looking at how beautifully rich and varied the world is outside of the walls of English. 'Ambulances, police cars, road signs all written in a foreign (to 99% of us) tongue. What is the point?', asks the reader. The point is to make you think, however uncomfortable (and possibly unusual) that might be. But let me say this: if all you can think of is that something unfamiliar must be negative, I wonder whether you actually want to spend your holidays abroad gasp! - in unfamiliar Italy, Spain, or France. You might find they don't speak English."