Gothic is a dead language belonging to the now extinct East Germanic group of the Germanic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. It is valuable for linguists because it was recorded several hundred years before the oldest surviving texts of all other Germanic languages, except for a few earlier runic inscriptions in Old Norse. The earliest extant document in Gothic is a translation of the Bible made in the 4th century A.D. by Ulfilas, a Gothic bishop. The language is known to us through this translation.