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The Gothic alphabet is an alphabet for writing the Gothic language. It was developed in the 4th century AD by Ulfilas (or Wulfila), a Goths preacher of Cappadocian Greek descent, for the purpose of translating the Bible.
In form, most letters resemble letters of the Greek alphabet. The origin of the alphabet is disputed: it is debated whether (or how) the Latin alphabet and Runes were used as a source. The set of letters, and the way that they are used, show some innovations to express Gothic phonology.
supposes that Ulfilas used a twenty-four letter Runic ''fuþark'' alphabet as his starting point and assigned most of its letters to corresponding letters of the twenty-seven letter Greek alphabet, taking the value of the Greek letters as numerals and their alphabetical position, and using additional symbols (some taken from the Latin alphabet) to take the place of remaining unmatched Greek letters. After the correspondences were established, Cercignani supposes the form of the Runic letters were either modified or outright replaced by the corresponding Latin or Greek letters. calls Cercignani's hypothesis of an adapted runic alphabet "not implausible".
argues that Ulfilas's alphabet was initially and primarily adapted from the Greek alphabet (cursive and perhaps also [[uncial|uncial script]]), with secondary influence from Latin and only minor, uncertain influence from Runic.
cites a number of authors that consider the Gothic alphabet to be derived from the Greek alphabet, influenced by Latin and Runic.
Ulfilas is thought to have consciously chosen to avoid the use of the older Runes for this purpose, as it was heavily connected with pagan beliefs and customs. Also, the Greek-based script probably helped to integrate the Gothic nation into the dominant Greco-Roman culture around the Black Sea.
As with the Greek alphabet, Gothic letters were also assigned numerical values. When used as numerals, letters were written either between two dots (•𐌹𐌱• = 12) or with an overline (𐌹𐌱 = 12). Two letters, 𐍁 (90) and 𐍊 (900), have no phonetic value.
Names for the letters are recorded in Codex Vindobonensis 795, a 9th-century manuscript of Alcuin. Most of them seem to be Gothic forms of names also appearing in the . The antiquity of these names is not certain: argues that the names recorded in this manuscript may be influenced by Old English and Old High German, and concludes that the original rune names are unknown. Most of the names follow the principle of acrophony (starting with the sound that the letter represents), which Cercignani argues must have been a feature of the original names used by Ulfilas. In the following table, the names are given in their attested forms followed by reconstructed Gothic forms and their meanings.
| 𐌰 | |
| 𐌱 | |
| 𐌲 | |
| 𐌳 | |
| 𐌴 | |
| 𐌵 | |
| 𐌶 | |
| 𐌷 | |
| 𐌸 | |
| 𐌹 | |
| 𐌺 | |
| 𐌻 | |
| 𐌼 | |
| 𐌽 | |
| 𐌾 | |
| 𐌿 | |
| 𐍀 | |
| 𐍁 | |
| 𐍂 | |
| 𐍃 | |
| 𐍄 | |
| 𐍅 | |
| 𐍆 | |
| 𐍇 | |
| 𐍈 | |
| 𐍉 | |
| 𐍊 |
𐍇 (x) is only used in proper names and loanwords containing Greek Χ ( xristus "Christ", galiugaxristus "Pseudo-Christ", zaxarias "Zacharias", aiwxaristia "eucharist").
The letter/numeral 𐍊 (900) is not attested in the Gothic bible, but only in the Salzburg-Vienna manuscript (Codex Vindobonensis 795).
However, a few letters have uncertain or disputed origins, and may have been taken from Latin alphabet or possibly (more controversially) Runic letters. These are:
𐍂 (r), 𐍃 (s) and 𐍆 (f) appear to be derived from their Latin equivalents rather than from the Greek, although the equivalent Runic letters (, and ), assumed to have been part of the Gothic futhark, possibly played some role in this choice. However, Snædal claims that "Wulfila's knowledge of runes was questionable to say the least", as the paucity of inscriptions attests that knowledge and use of runes was rare among the East Germanic peoples. Miller refutes this claim, stating that it is "not implausible" that Wulfila used a runic script in his creation of the Gothic alphabet, noting six other authors—Wimmer, Mensel, Hermann, d'Alquen, Rousseau, and Falluomini—who support the idea of the Gothic alphabet having runic contributions. Some variants of 𐍃 (s) are shaped like a sigma and more obviously derive from the Greek Σ.
The Unicode block for Gothic is – in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane. As older software that uses UCS-2 (the predecessor of UTF-16) assumes that all Unicode codepoints can be expressed as 16 bit numbers ( or lower, the Basic Multilingual Plane), problems may be encountered using the Gothic alphabet Unicode range and others outside of the Basic Multilingual Plane.
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