Regardless of the origins of some American folk music, evidently neither Scottish nor Irish Gaelic survived as a spoken language anywhere in Appalachia for more than a generation.

Also, despite the commonly held belief that the Southern Appalachians were "mostly" settled by the "Scots-Irish," the evidence, based almost entirely on a comparison of settlers' surnames with names in Ulster, is not terribly reliable, because the circa 1900 researchers counted a name as "Scots-Irish" even if it was equally common (in some cases even more common) in England or Wales.

We know now that the Scots-Irish were almost certainly the largest *single* immigrant group, but they were the largest among many minorities. *Most* early settlers were *not* Scots-Irish. Nearly as large was the second-largest minority, the English.

Immigrants from all of Great Britain made up by far the largest group of settlers from a single country (as Britain and Ireland were until 1922).