History of Scottish Gaelic
All surviving dialects are Highland and/or Hebridean dialects. Dialects of Lowland Gaelic have become defunct since the demise of Galwegian Gaelic, originally spoken in Galloway, which seems to have been the last Lowland dialect and which survived into the Modern Period. By the 18th century Lowland Gaelic had been largely replaced by Lowland Scots across much of Lowland Scotland. According to a reference in "The Carrick Covenanters " by James Crichton, the last place in the Lowlands where Scottish Gaelic was still spoken was the village of Barr in Carrick: only a few miles inland to the east of Girvan, but at one time very isolated. Crichton gives neither date nor details.
Gaels
The two comparatively "major" Gaelic nations in the modern era are Ireland (which in the 2002 census had 185,838 people who spoke Irish "daily" and 1,570,894 who were "able" to speak it) and Scotland (58,552 fluent "Gaelic speakers" and 92,400 with "some Gaelic language ability" in the 2001 census). Communities where the languages still are spoken natively are restricted largely to the west coast of each country and especially the Hebrides islands in Scotland. However, a large proportion of the Gaelic-speaking population now lives in the cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh in Scotland, and Donegal, Galway, Cork and Dublin in Ireland. There are about 2,000 Scottish Gaelic speakers in Canada (Canadian Gaelic dialect), although many are elderly and concentrated in Nova Scotia and more specifically Cape Breton Island. According to the U.S. Census in 2000, there are more than 25,000 Irish-speakers in the United States, with the majority found in urban areas with large Irish-American communities such as Boston, New York City and Chicago.