Q how to survive a gothic speaking people?

Zen9

Banned
Arguably they can settle in the Szkeley land, Dalmatia/Pannonia possibly the Thervingi somewhere in greater Thrace and a residue in upper Silisia with the remnant Vandals.
 
We can have them enter Dacia, Pannonia and Dalmitia, first and settle there. These provinces weren't of much strategic worth to the Romans.

Because of this, they don't invade the Western Roman Empire and it survives. The East looses Balkans but not it's core areas.

Eventually, they could conquer Northern Thrace(Bulgaria), Albania and Moesia. Byzantines still don't loose high worth lands.

Eventually, they could reconcile with both, the Western and Eastern Roman Empires. This could be interesting as we could see Gothic dynasties and armies in both the Empires. The firmly drawn boundaries of Western Roman Empire could be France, Italy, Spain and North Africa. For the East, it could be Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine and Egypt.

The Gothic kingdom/Kingdoms in the Balkans could convert to Arianism or Catholicism(there was no Orthodoxy yet) or remain Pagan, if possible.

Eventually, we could see Gothic dynasties in the Roman Empires.

This empire could provide alliance and defence to the Romans during the Viking and the Avar invasions. They could, additionally, spread influence to the West Germanic people like the Franks, Saxons, etc, too and establish relations with those kingdoms, too.

The Slavs, Avars and the Bulgars could be deflected to Ukraine and Central Russia in such case.
 

Zen9

Banned
So we're getting to a spectrum of outcomes to choose from.
At the lowest end we have one or more Gothic communities surviving in various pocket locations, not much impact beyond being curious remnants.
While at the higher end we have a East Germanic Balkans warping history completely into something very different from OTL.

I can see the attractions of the latter. But it's a rather substantial enterprise.

Which is why I'll stick with something more modest.
 
So we're getting to a spectrum of outcomes to choose from.
At the lowest end we have one or more Gothic communities surviving in various pocket locations, not much impact beyond being curious remnants.
While at the higher end we have a East Germanic Balkans warping history completely into something very different from OTL.

I can see the attractions of the latter. But it's a rather substantial enterprise.

Which is why I'll stick with something more modest.
I wouldn't say it's a substantial enterprise, it's actually pretty easy with a POD between 200-350, I don't see the extreme difficulties in achieving something clear cut as this, if anything it's easier than random pockets because like I said before we already have the Gothic surving in pockets IOTL so trying that again is probably not going to work.
 
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I disagree, Gothic survived IOTL centuries despite virtually no political power, there is a limit for how much you can push a language without political backing especially when lacking long term endogamous features.
How significant should the political backing be?
 
How significant should the political backing be?
Having some proper sizeable Gothic Foedus around the Danube or Dinaric alps would work, I think the problem with Crimea is the chain of migrations and nomadic attacks it would experience, if you could curb that post-Hunnic invasions you could have them survive in Crimea I guess, but the problem of size still remains IMO, so I'd rather go with the Balkans or Carpathian area.
 
The Goths originated in the Baltic region. Maybe the language dominates in south Scandinavia, or more particularly south Sweden? Alternately the Visgoths somehow are a bit more viable as a ruling class and the language survives in the Iberian region?

If they stay in Sweden they won’t be East Germanic, because most of the Goths stayed in Sweden and their language simply evolve into Norse. East Germanic first developed away from the Scandinavian languages on the other side of Baltic. It would be like saying that American English could have developed in England, if the early Americans hadn’t migrated to America.
 
Alls raihts, frijōnds, this question gets asked every couple of months, and for the most part, the Goths were well on their way to surviving, at least in Crimea. We have attestations to say that they kept kicking there till at least the 1700s, which if you ask me, is damned impressive. All you need is for that presence to be more concentrated, which is easy enough to do, just hand wave some more settlement into the region, and have a literary tradition develop among the populace. A lot hardly needs to change, it could even be just a great man POD, just someone needs to take the time and effort within the Gothic community to save the language via standardization and literary works. A Gothic Chaucer, if you would. Hell, the world at large hardly needs to change, and a map might not end up looking that different in the long run.

It's an idea I have played with for some time, and I've even knocked around the idea of working on Reconstructed Crimean Gothic, but I've not gotten around to it yet.
 
Having some proper sizeable Gothic Foedus around the Danube or Dinaric alps would work, I think the problem with Crimea is the chain of migrations and nomadic attacks it would experience, if you could curb that post-Hunnic invasions you could have them survive in Crimea I guess, but the problem of size still remains IMO, so I'd rather go with the Balkans or Carpathian area.
Do "Goths" have to be the dominant element in a state or society inorder for the language to be likely to survive.

I think that Crimea is a real possibility as a territory where continued use of the Gothic language. If the mountainous southern part of Crimea had been more Gothicised, that would increase the chance of Gothic persisting. Having a Gothic language dominant state there also improves the chance of Gothic. Of course this Crimean polity might become a vassal or tributary of a steppe based empire or a ERE polity.
 
If they stay in Sweden they won’t be East Germanic, because most of the Goths stayed in Sweden and their language simply evolve into Norse. East Germanic first developed away from the Scandinavian languages on the other side of Baltic. It would be like saying that American English could have developed in England, if the early Americans hadn’t migrated to America.
I heard the theory that East Germanic was particularly close to North Germanic is not really true, though I can't find right now where I read that, in any case as far as most of East Germanic is concerned it did not originate recently from Scandinavian, not even in early 1st century AD.

Alls raihts, frijōnds, this question gets asked every couple of months, and for the most part, the Goths were well on their way to surviving, at least in Crimea.
Not really, what we find is something so full of contemporary West Germanic features that really doesn't look like Gothic. Also it was not kicking in by any definition, it would be like saying Cornish is kicking in right now.

We have attestations to say that they kept kicking there till at least the 1700s, which if you ask me, is damned impressive.
We really don't, the very few attestation we have of the 17th and 18th century concern more the presence of Germanic loanwords and of some people with weird customs which some travellers assumed were Goths, this is not even evidence honestly. The last real attestation is from the mid-late 16th century and even there an argument could be made that the language transcribed is way too West Germanic to be simply a continuation of Gothic.

All you need is for that presence to be more concentrated, which is easy enough to do, just hand wave some more settlement into the region, and have a literary tradition develop among the populace. A lot hardly needs to change, it could even be just a great man POD, just someone needs to take the time and effort within the Gothic community to save the language via standardization and literary works. A Gothic Chaucer, if you would. Hell, the world at large hardly needs to change, and a map might not end up looking that different in the long run.
That did not work for Cornish and a plethora of other regional languages with far better demographics, Gothic was virtually moribund if not dead by the time of the early modern era. Gothic was basically only spoken in the southern coast of Crimea and the hilly areas since the early middle ages, one single person isn't going to change anything. There needs to be political changes in the high to late middle ages to avoid the terminal decline.

Do "Goths" have to be the dominant element in a state or society inorder for the language to be likely to survive.

I think that Crimea is a real possibility as a territory where continued use of the Gothic language. If the mountainous southern part of Crimea had been more Gothicised, that would increase the chance of Gothic persisting. Having a Gothic language dominant state there also improves the chance of Gothic. Of course this Crimean polity might become a vassal or tributary of a steppe based empire or a ERE polity.
If they are demographically a minority language or are confined in a small region it would be better if it was not put on the disadvantaged side of a diglossic situation.

I mean it could work but it's all contingent on how you interpret OTL, IMO Gothic died out in the 16th century at its latest and was probably supported by medieval Norse presence possibly, but if you think Gothic survived up to the 18th century then butterflying the Mongols might be enough and having continued Italian-Greek presence in the Black Sea against inland powers might preserve linguistic enclaves, but you would need to avoid the same kind of assimilation Southern Crimea experienced under the Ottomans or any heavy demographic pressure.
 

Zen9

Banned
There are complicating factors with Crimea.
For instance 'little England', established by Anglo-Saxon warriors who served in the Varangian Guard.

Then we gave Sarmatian.
This is all surviving in the Crimea.

Not really the ideal location.

I mean if the Goths retreated to the Crimea and a divine intervention caused the land bridge to be swept away then you might have conditions were they can hold out.

While it's rather less ASB/DI to say they settle in the Dalmatian mountains or the Carpathians.
 
If they stay in Sweden they won’t be East Germanic, because most of the Goths stayed in Sweden and their language simply evolve into Norse. East Germanic first developed away from the Scandinavian languages on the other side of Baltic. It would be like saying that American English could have developed in England, if the early Americans hadn’t migrated to America.
Do you mean to say that Germanic languages separated from the Proto-Germanic(spoken around Scandinavia) late?
 
I would make a Short to Medium Storyline about Gothic Empire encompassing Eastern Europe(Balkans and Pannonia).

For that, I would want details about who were the Natives in these regions before the Hunnic conquest and Slavic Expansion.
 
If they are demographically a minority language or are confined in a small region it would be better if it was not put on the disadvantaged side of a diglossic situation.

Even if they were the majority population, it might not suffice. Look at the Visigoths: they were the dominant "ethnicity" (I know modern late-roman historians don't like this word, unless you're Herwig Wolfram) in their iberian kingdom, and still a great deal of their culture and language got erased.

When it comes to their language, it thoroughly disappeared. In fact, we have no record of any Gothic spoken, written or used in the Iberian Peninsula until some Gothic-sounding titles appear in the 7-8th Centuries out of nowhere, and still no mention of spoken Gothic or no record of written Gothic language. This may be a consequence of our sources being mostly ecchlesiastical discourse and debate, hagiographies and scholarly chronicles; maybe the ruling Goths just didn't care about language the way Bede did in Britain. Maybe, just maybe, the Visigoths didn't even speak Gothic when Ataulf came to Spain (a commonly held theory claims that the "Visigoths" weren't really an ehtnic group of Goths but a collection of mercenaries, deserters, barbarians and Alaric's own Roman army, since he was in fact magister militum of the Roman Empire; this group would go through ethnogenesis under the moniker "Goth" and take up mostly Gothic names, but would not be, in any way, a "Gothic" ehtnicity, and they forgot the Gothic language fairly quickly). Maybe they just suffered dyglossia in relation to Latin, and lost the linguistic tug-of-war, in a way that didn't happen in England with the Brythonic languages (and just as the Franks, Ostrogoths and Longobards went through as well). This is very close to what Brown and Dumézil defend.

So, even if you could get the Ostrogoths or any other kind of Goths to survive in Eastern Europe, it'd better be an isolated valley in the Carpathians or deep inside the Balkans, otherwise, my money's on these Goths not retaining their language. You would need them to be: a) Not in any constant contact with Latin, b) Self-ruled, to avoid dyglossia, and c) Not Catholic, but this may be only incidental.
 

Zen9

Banned
Gothic or Gautnish is the earliest recorded Germanic language on any bulk. Part of the reason for why it posses more archaic features than other Germanic branches.
This makes sense considering the patterns of movement they had prior to expanding into the Ukraine.
Germanic tribes tended to move to a patch to clearing forest, farming it out and having to move again.
This made for a fluid definition of tribal lands and a preference for seperation from each tribe.
The Lugiian Confederation, held sway in the east, Suevian in the west.

Personally I'm tending to two kingdoms. One in what we'd call Greater Croatia , the other in Szeklerland/Transylvania. Both being Ostrogoth and other east germanic peoples.

Originally they'd be connected by Gepids in Dacia, Thervingi and Sarmatians on the plains.
Come the Huns, Avars, Slavs and Magyars, this connection would be swept away.
To be re-established by Charlemagne and the HREG.

This leaves the Vandals and Visigoths to as per OTL.
Even events in Italy can still follow the course of OTL, with the addition that Goths and other Arians, would migrate to these safe areas. Further bolstered by the exile of the Vandals and Alans and possibly Donations for good measure.

The Heretic Kingdoms.
 
Visigoths weren't the Majority, I think. There was probably a huge population of Gallic and Iberian Celtic peoples who were Romanized, plus the Basques in the North.
I don't know if Iberians existed by then.

That's part of the problem we have nowadays studying ancient peoples. Most accounts and most attiudes we find tell us that pre-nationalist views on "culture" and "ethnicity" were much more flexible and mutable. Iberians as a culture, language and customs unit had long disappeared, but the people living in Eastern Spain were still very much descendants of those the Romans and Greeks had called "iberians" back in the day.

Visigoths were not the majority, but neither were the Romans in Spain or Gaul, or the Turks in Turkey, or the Arabs in Egypt. Where the Romans had placed greater weight in adopting Roman culture and speaking Latin, the Visigoths spoke (apparently) Latin, because it was already a useful and prestigious language, and retained snippets of Gothic culture and language for specific reasons.

For example, not one single King of the Visigoths had a Roman name, but we know that Gothic families gave Roman or Greek names to their children, maybe as often as Gothic ones. What happened? Maybe the custom demanded a Gothic name for the King, and so they changed names. We know next to nothing of the life and family of most Visigothic kings, so who knows. Hermenegild's baptismal name was John, but he always referred to himself as Hermenegildus Rex.

If we apply this logic to the East-Gothic kingdom in, say, the Carpathians, we'd end up with an amalgamation of peoples (Goths, Avars, Gepids, etc etc etc) who, instead of Latin, used Gothic as a lingua franca. Maybe if we have more East-German or Gothic kingdoms around them, and surviving longer (maybe even retaining the "default Gothic church", the Arian faith, with Gothic as the lithurgical language), then a Gothic-inclined civilization can exist, just like German did, or Anglo-Saxon, or Irish. Many states, the need for a lingua france which was spoken by most of the populatin as well as the elite, and a religious center based on this language.

Have the Gepid kingdom in Pannonnia survive longer, create a Neuheimar in the Carpathians which can develop into a state, have them defeat the Avars and the Magyars (maybe an alliance with the Eastern Empire makes this easier)... It's an interesting concept.

Personally I'm tending to two kingdoms. One in what we'd call Greater Croatia , the other in Szeklerland/Transylvania. Both being Ostrogoth and other east germanic peoples.

Originally they'd be connected by Gepids in Dacia, Thervingi and Sarmatians on the plains.
Come the Huns, Avars, Slavs and Magyars, this connection would be swept away.
To be re-established by Charlemagne and the HREG.

[...]
The Heretic Kingdoms.

Having Charlemagne expand influence into the Gothic kingdoms in Transylvania and Croatia, and reinforce them, is a neat idea.
 

Zen9

Banned
To give a more Yugoslavian feel we could have southern Goths convert to the Orthodox rite later on.

Which in turn gives us internal conflict among them.
 

Zen9

Banned
So we'd have Ostrogothland (Dalmatia a.k.a Greater Croatia) and Gepidiland (Szeklerland a.k.a Dacia). Possibly Thervingiland as well but this might end up more as something absorbed into one or the other.

I tend to see them as frontier states that will hold back the Turks, as they have the Hungarians, Avars and Huns. At least that'show they'd talk about themselves.

We have a distinct church in the Arian version of Christianity and their own Bible in their language.

I'll have to dig but at some point the Catholic Church does soften towards this 'Heresy', and in OTL this resurrects in Poland. One might expect Gothic influence there.....

Equally one expect Gothic terms to be borrowed into Italian, Hungarian and nearby Slavic speaking peoples.

What is the effect I wonder on Martin Luther and the Protestants later on?

Would they stay out of the HREG? Assuming they do , do they then became bases for families to contest power Prussian/Austrian style inside the HREG?
Equally in Poland. Could they not provide contestants for the Polish crown?
 
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What is the effect I wonder on Martin Luther and the Protestants later on?

Would they stay out of the HREG? Assuming they do , do they then became bases for families to contest power Prussian/Austrian style inside the HREG?
Equally in Poland. Could they not provide contestants for the Polish crown?
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Visigoths were not the majority, but neither were the Romans in Spain or Gaul, or the Turks in Turkey, or the Arabs in Egypt. Where the Romans had placed greater weight in adopting Roman culture and speaking Latin, the Visigoths spoke (apparently) Latin, because it was already a useful and prestigious language, and retained snippets of Gothic culture and language for specific reasons.
True but not all migrations are the same, some are stronger than others, some affect areas that would be more advantegous to mass assimilation, some affect certain social classes more etc.
 
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