Gothic (*Gutisko razda)

Spoken in:
Continental Eruope
Tenth century
Gothic LanguageThe Gothic language (*gutisko razda) is Extinction:
a Germanic language, part of the family of IndoFamily:
Indo-European
European languages, and is the oldest of the Germanic
Germanic
languages, despite having no modern descendants. The
Eastern
oldest documents in the Gothic language date back to the
Gothic
fourth century.
Writing:
Gothic alphabet
The use of the language was in decline by the midLanguage codes
sixth century, in part because of the military defeat of the ISO 639-1:
-Goths by the Franks, the elimination of the Goths from
ISO 639-2:
got
Italy, the large-scale conversion to Roman Catholicism
ISO 639-3:
got
(which primarily used Latin), and geografic isolation.
The language survived in the Iberian Peninsula until the eighth century, with the Frankish author
Walafrid Strabo reporting that it was still spoken in the area of the Lower Danube and in isolated
mountain regions of Crimea at the beginning of the ninth century. The terms seeming to belong to
Gothic found in later manuscripts (sixteenth century) in Crimea do not appear to belong to the same
language. The existence of this early attested corpus makes the Gothic language an object of interest in
comparative linguistics.

History
The Gothic language was the language of two Germanic peoples: the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths.
The oldest Germanic texts, except for few runic inscriptions, are written in this language. These texts
come from the translation that Ulfilas made of the Bible in the fourth century and from other sources
from the sixth century.
The early history of the Goths is obscure. Traditionally, the sixth-century historian Procopius
claims that they moved from Gotland in eastern Sweden to the coastal region next to the mouth of the
Vistula River in the first century B.C. Tacitus mentions the existence of the Goths by the year 98 in the
same region. By the year 200 they had migrated to the southern region of Russia, reaching the Black
Sea in the region of the Sea of Azov. One can distinguish two groups: the Visis (visi; "good") and the
Ostrogoths (eastern Goths). Later the designation Visigoth was introduced and was interpreted as
"Western Goths" because geographically they were located on the eastern side of the Roman Empire
until the fall of the Romans, then in the Iberian Peninsula by the fifth century, with other Germanic
groups whose languages are only known by names (Burgundians, Vandals, etc.). The Goths and their
language are placed among the East Germans, in contrast to the northern Germanic peoples and their
Scandinavian languages, and the West Germans in central Europe.
In the fourth century the Goths were in close contact with the Eastern Roman Empire; those
captured during the battles were baptized, and the new religion was introduced by other means also.
The grandparents of Ulfilas were taken captive in a Roman raid on the village of Sadagoltina, in
Cappadocia, in the year 264, which leads us to suppose that Ulfilas was educated in the Christian faith.
In the year 336 he traveled as part of a delegation to the imperial court, and there embraced Arian
doctrine in its Homoian form. For this reason, when Ulfilas returned, he brought with him this form of
Christianity, so it can be supposed that the Goths had been made Arians when they invaded the Roman
Empire and founded kingdoms whose religious inspiration was of this nature. The political and military
end of the Goths occurred in 555 when the Ostrogoths were defeated by the general Belisarius, and in
the year 711 when the Visigoths in Spain were defeated by Muslim armies.