The Obituary
Crimean Gothic was an East Germanic language spoken by descendants of the Goths who settled in Crimea, surviving in that remote corner long after Gothic had died out across the rest of Europe. Almost everything known about it comes from the Flemish diplomat Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, who in the 1560s met two men from Crimea in Constantinople and recorded around eighty words and a song. The language is thought to have died out by the 18th or 19th century, absorbed by the Crimean Tatar and other peoples around it.
Worth remembering
- Nearly all that survives is a list of about 80 words written down by a Flemish ambassador in Constantinople in the 1560s.
- It is the only Germanic language attested to have survived in the Crimea, a Gothic remnant after a millennium.
Sources
A graveyard tradition: leave a stone to show you came, and remembered.