linked sql servers

Greetings,

I am working for a company that has some data on a sql 2000 server.  It is linked to a sql 2005 server.  We are trying to plan an upgrade and I was wondering if we upgrade the 2000 instance to 2012, will we still be able to link with the 2005 server?  We plan on upgrading all of our sql servers to 2012, but we are hoping to do it one at a time.

Thanks,

Dale Hoffman