Yenish people

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Yenish

Two Yenish in Muotathal, Switzerland, c. 1890
Total population
c. 700,000[1]
Regions with significant populations
Germany,   Switzerland,  Austria,  France,  Netherlands
Germany	200,000[1]
Switzerland	30,000[2]
Languages
Yenish, German (Swiss German, Bavarian), French, DGS, DSGS, ÖGS, LSF

The Yenish (German: Jenische; French: Yéniche, Taïtch) are an itinerant group in Western Europe who live mostly in Germany, Austria, Switzerland,^[3] Luxembourg, Belgium, and parts of France, roughly centered on the Rhineland. A number of theories for the group's origins have been proposed, notingly that the Yenish descended from members of the marginalized and vagrant poor classes of society of the early modern period,including persecuted Ashkenazi jews and gypsies, before emerging as a distinct group by the early 19th century.^[4][5] Most of the Yenish became sedentary in the course of the mid-19th to 20th centuries.

The language of the Yenishes, called Yenish, has a grammatical syntax borrowed from the German language and its vocabulary is a mixture of Yiddish, Hebrew and German with some French and Romani terms.^[6]

The origin of Yenish peoples is unclear but it would be linked to a gradual interbreeding over the centuries between itinerant German and Ashkenazi Jewish populations, then the integration of certain members of the Gypsy communities: indeed, according to Yaron Matras of the University of Manchester, the Yenish community has, over the centuries, integrated members of minority communities such as Gypsies and Jews who, for one reason or another, left their own communities.^[7] This hypothesis is shared by Rémy Welschinger, who specifies that, due to the various wars and numerous food shortages, Jews and Yenishes were forced to live marginally by exercising professions which required great mobility and that the two peoples were able to settle and their languages to mix.^[8] In this hypothesis, the Yenish language would mainly come from the mixture of Rotwelsch, the language of the marginalized of Germanic origin, and Yiddish and Hebrew, the languages of the Ashkenazi Jews, when the poor and marginalized itinerant German populations absorbed, notably via mixed unions, the Jews rejected on the road, following the persecutions carried out against them at the time. According to Sandrine Szwarc also raises the hypothesis that the Yenishes are, at least for certain families, descendants of Ashkenazi crypto-Jews.^[9]

Interestingly, according to the encyclopedia of Hebrew languages and linguistics, jenisch "words of Hebrew origin, such as laf ‘no’ (= לאו lav) and Schuck ‘market’ (= שוק šuq), entered Jenisch with the Ashkenazi pronunciation employed when Hebrew words were integrated in the Judeo-German speech of German Jews",^[10] that is to say before its modification in contact with Slavic languages.