Gothic

Gothic is the extinct East Germanic language of the Goths and the earliest Germanic tongue attested in substantial texts. Its principal monuments are sixth-century copies of a Bible translation made in the fourth century by Ulfilas (Wulfila, 311–382), the Arian bishop of a Visigothic community in Moesia.

He devised a Gothic alphabet and rendered most of the New Testament from Greek. The Codex Argenteus preserves much of the four gospels.

Gothic declined after the mid-sixth century, as the Goths lost their kingdoms in Italy and Gaul and the Visigoths of Spain abandoned Arianism in 589; it lingered as a spoken language in the Iberian Peninsula into the eighth century. Crimean Gothic, a related form, was recorded by the Habsburg envoy Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq in the 1550s and was still reported in use during the eighteenth century.