Editing Goths (section)

==Language==
{{Main|Gothic language|Gothic alphabet}}
The Goths were [[Germanic languages|Germanic-speaking]].<ref name="Heather_2007">{{harvnb|Heather|2007|p=467}}. "Goths – Germanic-speaking group first encountered in northern Poland in the first century AD."</ref> The Gothic language is the [[Germanic language]] with the earliest attestation (the 4th century),{{sfn|Heather|2010|p=63}}{{sfn|Howatson|2011}} and the only [[East Germanic languages|East Germanic language]] documented in more than proper names, [[De conviviis barbaris|short phrases]] that survived in historical accounts, and loan-words in other languages, making it a language of great interest in [[comparative linguistics]]. Gothic is known primarily from the [[Codex Argenteus]], now preserved in [[Uppsala]], Sweden, which contains a partial translation of the Bible credited to [[Ulfilas]].{{sfn|Pronk-Tiethoff|2013|pp=9–11}}

The language was in decline by the mid-500s, due to the military victory of the Franks, the elimination of the Goths in Italy, and geographic isolation. In Spain, the language lost its last and probably already declining function as a church language when the Visigoths converted to Catholicism in 589;{{sfn|Pohl|Reimitz|1998|pp=119–21}} it survived as a domestic language in the Iberian peninsula (modern [[Spain]] and [[Portugal]]) as late as the 8th century.

[[Franks|Frankish]] author [[Walafrid Strabo]] wrote that Gothic was still spoken in the lower [[Danube]] area, in what is now Bulgaria, in the early 9th century,{{sfn|Pronk-Tiethoff|2013|pp=9–11}} and a related dialect known as [[Crimean Gothic]] was spoken in the Crimea until the 16th century, according to references in the writings of travelers.{{sfn|Simpson|2010|p=460}} Most modern scholars believe that Crimean Gothic did not derive from the dialect that was the basis for Ulfilas' translation of the Bible.