Gothic Alphabet Table
| Letter | Translit. | From Greek | Name |
|---|---|---|---|
| 𐌰 | a | Α | aza |
| 𐌱 | b | Β | bercna |
| 𐌲 | g | Γ | geuua |
| 𐌳 | d | Δ | daaz |
| 𐌴 | e (ē) | Ε (ϵ) | eyz |
| 𐌵 | q | class=skin-invert-image|x16px (Ϛ), not a typo|ϰ, Ⲋ(?) | quertra |
| 𐌶 | z | Ζ | ezec |
| 𐌷 | h | Η | haal |
| 𐌸 | þ (th) | Φ, Ψ, Ⲑ | thyth |
| 𐌹 | i | Ι | iiz |
| 𐌺 | k | Κ | chozma |
| 𐌻 | l | Λ | laaz |
| 𐌼 | m | Μ | manna |
| 𐌽 | n | Ν | noicz |
| 𐌾 | j | G, ᛃ, Ⲝ(?) | gaar |
| 𐌿 | u | ᚢ, Ⲟ(?) | uraz |
| 𐍀 | p | Π | pertra |
| 𐍁 | – | Ϙ (x16px) | – |
| 𐍂 | r | R, Ρ | reda |
| 𐍃 | s | S, Ϲ | sugil |
| 𐍄 | t | Τ | tyz |
| 𐍅 | w | Υ | uuinne |
| 𐍆 | f | Ϝ, F, Ⲫ(?) | fe |
| 𐍇 | x | Χ | enguz |
| 𐍈 | not a typo|ƕ (hw) | Θ, Ⲯ(?) | uuaer |
| 𐍉 | o (ō) | Ω, Ο, ᛟ, Ⲱ | utal |
| 𐍊 | – | Ͳ (Ϡ) | – |
The Gothic alphabet exists because one bishop wanted his people to read the Bible in their own tongue. Wulfila ('little wolf', 311-383 AD), a Gothic preacher of Cappadocian Greek descent, was consecrated for the mission to the Goths across the Danube; to translate scripture he needed a script, and his solution was elegant borrowing: the body of the alphabet is Greek uncial letters in Gothic dress - aza from alpha, bercna from beta, gib from gamma - with a couple of letters recruited from the runes Goths already carved, and one pure invention, hwair, for a sound Greek had no letter for. The result is 27 letters, and the chart above lists every one with its transliteration, its Greek parent and its Gothic name.
The alphabet's survival is a story of one spectacular book. Wulfila's translation made the Goths the first Germanic people with a written literature, but the language died out centuries later - its last recorded speaker community, Crimean Gothic, faded in the 1700s. What keeps the alphabet alive is the Codex Argenteus, the 'Silver Bible': a 6th-century manuscript, written in gold and silver ink on purple vellum, now in Uppsala - the longest surviving Gothic text and one of the most beautiful books ever made. Every letter in the chart below appears in it. For linguists the alphabet is priceless: Gothic is the only substantial witness to the East Germanic branch, and without Wulfila's letters the reconstruction of Proto-Germanic - and thus the deep history of English - would rest on far shakier ground.
How to use
- Read the table by its Greek column if you know the Greek alphabet - roughly two thirds of the letters are Greek uncial shapes carrying near-Greek values (a, b, g, d from alpha, beta, gamma, delta), which is why Gothic texts look simultaneously familiar and alien: the shapes are Mediterranean, the words are the tongue of Theodoric's warriors. The transliteration column is the standard scholarly convention; the name column gives the native letter names recorded in manuscripts (aza, bercna, gib...), most of them Germanic words - 'oak', 'birch', 'gift' - continuing the acrophonic letter-name tradition the alphabet inherited from its ultimate ancestors.
- Spot the three outsider letters. Winq (Ʈ) looks like a w and comes from the runic wunjo; the towering huul (Ꞝ) descends from a rune of the same family; and hwair (ꞙ), the last letter, was invented from scratch for the Gothic hw-sound (as in 'when') that Greek orthography had no clean way to write. Two letters to handle with care: ei spells a long e or perhaps i (manuscripts vary), and eng (ꞛ) is a curiosity - it appears in only one word in the surviving corpus, in one manuscript. The chart's last letter, hwair, has no attested use in the Bible text at all: it survives as the numeral 900 in the Gothic number system, a letter that became a digit before we ever see it as a letter.
- Read the numbers like the Greeks. Gothic inherited the Greek habit of using letters as numerals, and the chart's letters map onto values 1-900 in the Greek sequence (aza=1, bercna=2...). The most famous example is the hwair-900 combination noted above; manuscript chapter numbers and canon tables use the letter-numerals throughout. If you are transcribing Codex Argenteus pages - all 188 surviving leaves are digitized - you will meet the letter-numerals in the marginal apparatus, and this table is your key.
Frequently asked questions
Who was Wulfila, and why did a bishop invent an alphabet?
Wulfila (Latin Ulfilas, 'little wolf', c. 311-383) was a Goth of Cappadocian Greek ancestry - his family had been taken captive in Gothic raids on Asia Minor - raised inside the Roman Empire and ordained bishop 'for the Christians in the Gothic country' around 341. His mission lasted four decades; his achievement was the Bible in Gothic, and the alphabet was the instrument. Sources credit him with designing it specifically for the translation (the church historians Socrates, Sozomen and Philostorgius treat the alphabet as his invention). He also gave the Goths a doctrinal identity - he was an Arian, which shaped Gothic Christianity's separation from Rome - and a political destiny his converts carried from the Danube to the sacking of an empire. One man, one alphabet, one Bible: the same improbable unit of cultural engineering that produced Armenian (Mesrop Mashtots) and Cherokee (Sequoyah).
Is the Gothic alphabet related to the runes?
Only at the edges, and the edges are informative. The bulk of the alphabet is Greek uncial writing - Wulfila was Greek-educated, and Greek was the liturgical and scriptural medium he knew from inside. But two letters (the w-shaped winq and the towering huul) are generally traced to runic forms, and the very idea of letters with native Germanic names (aza, bercna, gib - 'oak', 'birch', 'gift') mirrors the rune tradition's naming habit. There is an old scholarly theory that the whole alphabet is a crypto-runic cipher; few hold it today, but the debate itself shows how neatly the alphabet sits between two worlds - Greek scripture on the surface, Germanic carving tradition underneath. Our runic alphabet table shows the shapes side by side; the resemblance of winq to runic wunjo is visible at a glance.
Can I read the Codex Argenteus with this chart?
The alphabet, yes - the language takes longer. The Silver Bible (Codex Argenteus, Uppsala University Library) is written in Wulfila's letters, gold and silver on purple vellum, and its 188 surviving leaves are fully digitized; with this chart you can sound out the letters and use any standard Gothic grammar and glossary to work through passages - the Gospels in Gothic are the single most-studied early Germanic text on Earth, and every word of the surviving corpus is cataloged. Practical tips: the manuscript uses the letter-numerals in its margins (our table doubles as the number key), ligatures are rare because Gothic's one-syllable-one-sign structure needs none, and ei, as noted, may spell either long e or i - the manuscripts themselves are not consistent. Reading Gothic is one of the last places you can watch the birth of a Germanic literary language in real time, in a book this beautiful.
Is Gothic a dead language - and is it related to English?
Dead but foundational - and closely related to English. Gothic is the only well-attested member of the East Germanic branch; the West Germanic branch (English, German, Dutch, Frisian) and North Germanic (Scandinavian) are its cousins. Its value to linguists is as a time machine: Gothic preserves archaic features (rich verb inflection, the dual number, a full passive) that English and its neighbors wore away, so nearly every reconstruction of Proto-Germanic - the common ancestor of English - leans on Gothic evidence, filtered through Wulfila's alphabet. The last living pocket, Crimean Gothic, was reported by travelers into the 18th century and then vanishes from record. So the alphabet in this chart is the only door into a whole branch of the language family you are reading about right now.
Why does the last letter exist only as the number 900?
Because hwair was invented for a sound the Bible happened not to need often enough to survive in text. Wulfila created hwair (ꞙ) for the Gothic hw-cluster - the sound at the start of English 'when' or 'where' - and it appears in proper names and loanwords in the corpus. But its principal attested role in the manuscripts is as the numeral 900, completing the Greek-style letter-number ladder (aza=1 through hwair=900); the scholar Wilhelm Streitberg and the manuscript tradition both treat it as a letter that lives mainly as a digit. There is a poetic symmetry: Wulfila coined a letter for his Bible's readers, and the tradition kept it for the accountants. The Unicode consortium encoded it at U+1034A, the last slot of the Gothic block - a letter, a numeral, and a 1,600-year-old coinage all in one codepoint.