Crimean Gothic

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Crimean Gothic
Spoken in:	formerly Crimea
Language extinction:	by the 18th century
Language family:	Indo-European Germanic East Germanic Crimean Gothic
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	`got`
ISO/FDIS 639-3:	`got` — Gothic
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key.

Crimean Gothic was a dialect of Gothic that was spoken by the Crimean Goths in some isolated locations in Crimea (now Ukraine) perhaps until as late as the 18th century.

Few fragments of the Crimean Gothic have survived: All our knowledge is based on a letter by the 16th century Flemish ambassador Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, which gives a list of some eighty words and a bit of insight into its grammar.

Crimean Gothic is almost universally recognized as Gothic on the grounds of its phonological features: the word ada "egg", for instance, shows the typical Gothic "strengthening" of Proto-Germanic *-jj- into -ddj- (as in Ulfilian Gothic iddja "went" from PGmc. *ejjon), being from PGmc. *ajja-.

The Vikings may have discovered their presence, since the Gutasaga relates that a third of Gotland's inhabitants had to leave the island and settle in the land of the Greeks, where they still retained much of the same language as Old Gutnish.