| Group | Germanic (with Old Saxon, Old Norse, etc.), East Germanic (with dialects of Burgunds, Gepids etc.) |
| Geography | Originally located in Soutern Scandinavia, in the 3rd century AD moved to Europe and settled on the territory of modern Romania, Bulgaria, later Ukraine. After dividing into two main parts: Ostrogoths and Wisigoths, the former settled in Italy, the latter moved to Spain and Southern France. |
| History | The earliest records date back to the 3rd century. The majority of texts, including Wulfila's Bible, was written between the 5th and the 6th century. Soon afterwards, Gothic was assimilated by Romance dialects in Italy, Spain and France. In Crimea, remnants of Gothic existed till the 17th century. |
| Phonetics | A rather archaic phonetic system: Germanic stops were preserved here together with their specific fricative allophones (t / ); the Common Germanic * also remained in Gothic, though disappeared in all other Germanic languages. Vowel mutations are exceedingly frequent in morphology. The Verner's Law is absent in Gothic. |
| Nominal Morphology | The noun has all four Germanic cases, adjectives and pronouns also preserved the instrumental case. Types of declension are numerous, having all three genders. Pronouns often use the dual number, which gradually disappears in other Germanic dialects. There is also the Indo-European reflexve pronoun seina, sis, sik 'self'. |
| Verbal Morphology | Gothic is the only Germanic language which preserved reduplication in the 7th class of strong verbs (haitan - haihait 'to call - called'). Some other important characteristic features include the mediopassive voice (niman - nimada 'to take - I took for myself'), the dual forms everywhere (nimats 'you two take'). The complex past suffix of the weak verbs reflects the origins of the dental element: English they filled = Gothic fulljodedun. |
| Lexicon | Though the sources of the Gothic language are rather scarce, there are a great lot of archaic terms which make the language most useful for comparative studies. |
| Writing | Gothic alphabet |
| Close Contacts | Other East Germanic dialects (Burgunada, Gepidan, etc.) are known only in fragments. A lot of features of orthography and plenty of words were borrowed from Greek. |
| Sample | i ik qia izwis ni andstandan allis amma
unseljin; ak jabai hwas uk stautai bi taihswon eina kinnu,
wandei imma jah o anara.
And I tell you not to resist the evil; but if someone hurts your right cheek, give him also another one. |
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