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The Yenish people as a distinct group, as opposed to the generic class of vagrants of the early modern period, emerged towards the end of the 18th century. The adjective jenisch is first recorded in the early 18th century in the sense of "cant, argot".[a] A self-designation Jauner is recorded in 1793.[b]Jenisch remained strictly an adjective that refers to the language, not the people, until the first half of the 19th century. Jean Paul (1801) glosses jänische Sprache ("Yenish language") with so nennt man in Schwaben die aus fast allen Sprachen zusammengeschleppte Spitzbubensprache ("this is the term used in Swabia for an argot used by rogues which has been cobbled together from all sorts of languages").[7] An anonymous author in 1810 argues that Jauner is a deprecating term, equivalent to card sharp, and that the proper designation for the people should be jenische Gasche, Gasche being a slang word derived from the Romani term for 'non-Romani'.[8][9]
Germany
Many Yenish people in Germany became sedentary in the second half of the 19th century. The Kingdom of Prussia in 1842 introduced a law forcing municipalities to provide social welfare to permanent residents without citizenship. As a consequence, there were attempts to prevent Yenish people from taking permanent residence.[10] Recently established settlements of Yenish, Sinti, and Roma, dubbed "gypsy colonies" (Zigeunerkolonien), were discouraged and attempts were made to incite the settlers to move away, in the form of various forms of harassment, and in some cases physical attacks.[11] By the late 19th century, many recently sedentary Yenish were nevertheless integrated into local populations, gradually moving away from their tradition of endogamy thus being absorbed into the general German population. Those Yenish who did not become sedentary by the late 19th century took to living in trailers.
The persecution of Romani people under Nazi Germany beginning in 1933 was directed not exclusively against the Romani people but also targeted "vagrants who travel around after the manner of the gypsies" ("nach Zigeunerart umherziehende Landfahrer"), which included the Yenish and people without permanent residence in general.[12][13] Travellers were scheduled for internment in Buchenwald, Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Neuengamme.[14] Yenish families began to be registered in a Landfahrersippenarchiv ('archive of travelling families'), but this effort was incomplete by the end of World War II.[15] It appears that only very limited numbers of Yenish (compared with the number of Romani victims) were actually deported: five Yenish individuals are on record as having been deported from Cologne,[16] and a total of 279 woonwagenbewoners ('caravan dwellers') are known to have been deported from the Netherlands in 1944.[17] Lewy (2001) has discovered one case of the deportation of a Yenish woman in 1939.[18] The Yenish people are mentioned as a persecuted group in the text of the 2012 Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Victims of National Socialism in Berlin.[19]
Switzerland
In 2001, Swiss National Councillor Remo Galli, as speaker of the foundation Zukunft für Schweizer Fahrende, reported an estimate of 35,000 "travellers" (Fahrende, a term combining Sinti, Roma and Yenish), both sedentary and non-sedentary, in Switzerland, among them an estimated 20,000 Yenish people.[20] Mariella Mehr had already claimed in 1979 that there were "about 20,000 Yenish", among whom only "a handful of families who are still travelling".[21]
From the 1920s until the 1970s, the Swiss government had a semi-official policy of institutionalizing Yenish parents as mentally ill and having their children adopted by members of the sedentary Swiss population. The name of this program was Kinder der Landstrasse ('Children of the Road'). The separation of children was justified as the Yenish being a 'criminal milieu' of 'homelessness and vagrancy' was later criticized as a violation of the fundamental rights of the Yenishe to family life, with children separated from parents by force without due criminal procedure, and resulting in many of the children suffering an ordeal of successive foster homes and orphanages.[22] In all, 590 children were taken from their parents and institutionalized in orphanages, mental institutions, and even prisons. Child removals peaked in the 1930s to 1940s, in the years leading up to and during World War II. After public criticism in 1972, the program was discontinued in 1973.[23]
An organisation for the political representation of travellers (Yenish as well as Sinti and Roma) was founded in 1975, named Radgenossenschaft der Landstrasse ("Wheel Cooperative of the Road"). The Swiss federal authorities have officially recognized the "Swiss Yenish and Sinti" as a "national minority".[24] With the ratification of the European language charter in 1997, Switzerland has given the status of a "territorial non-tied language" to the Yenish language.
Austria
Around 1800, a group of Yenish settled in Loosdorf near Melk, and since then a language island of Yenish has existed there.[25] In November 2021, on the initiative of linguist Heidi Schleich and now chairman Marco Buckovez, the association Jenische in Österreich (Yenish in Austria)[26] was founded with headquarters in Innsbruck. As part of a meeting with the ethnic group spokespersons of the parliamentary parties, the association submitted a request for recognition in accordance with the Ethnic Groups Act on 23 March 2022.[27]
France
While there are references to Yenish people in France, there are no reported figures.[28]Alain Reyniers [fr] wrote in a 1991 article in the journal Etudes Tsiganes that the Yenish "probably form the largest group of travellers in France today".[29]
Yenish organisations
Radgenossenschaft der Landstrasse (Switzerland)
Jenischer Kulturverband (Austria)
Jenischer Bund in Deutschland und Europa (Germany)
Mariella Mehr (1947–2022), notable for documenting the plight she suffered under the Kinder der Landstrasse project in the 1970s, contributing to its discontinuation
Stephan Eicher (b. 1960), Swiss musician, Yenish on his father's side
Oliver Kayser [lb], Luxembourgish musician and variété performer
^The 1714 reference refers to the Rotwelsch cant, not its speakers, with no implication of an itinerant lifestyle.[6]
^Jauner is reported as a Rotwelsch term for vagrants in Swabia. Johann Ulrich Schöll, Abriß des Jauner- und Bettelwesens in Schwaben nach Akten und andern sichern Quellen von dem Verfasser des Konstanzer Hans. Stuttgart 1793. The author of the 1793 work identifies the vagrant populations of criminals as a recent phenomenon, originally due to vagrant soldiers in the Thirty Years' War and reinforced by later wars.
^Seidenspinner, Wolfgang (1985). "Herrenloses Gesindel. Armut und vagierende Unterschichten im 18. Jahrhundert" [Masterless Rabble: Poverty and Wandering Underclasses in the 18th Century]. Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins (in German). 133: 381–386.
^Kluge, Friedrich (1987) [1901]. Rotwelsch. Quellen und Wortschatz der Gaunersprache und der verwandten Geheimsprachen [Rotwelsch. Sources and vocabulary of the thieves’ language and related secret languages] (in German). Strasbourg. p. 175f.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
^Paul, Jean (1801). Komischer Anhang zum Titan [Funny appendix to Titan] (in German). p. 108.
^Anonymous (24 August 1810). "Die Jauner-Sprache" [The Jauner language]. Der Erzähler (in German). No. 34. p. 157f.
^Matras, Yaron (1998). "The Romani element in German secret languages: Jenisch and Rotwelsch". In Matras, Yaron (ed.). The Romani Element in Non-Standard Speech. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. pp. 193–230. Gasche is itself a Rotwelsch term, derived from the Romani term gadže 'non-gypsies'.
^Verordnung über die Aufnahme neu anziehender Personen vom 31. Dezember 1842, Neue Sammlung, 6. Abt., S. 253–254; Verordnung über die Verpflichtung zur Armenpflege vom 31. Dezember 1842, ebenda, S. 255–258; Verordnung über Erwerbung und Verlust der Eigenschaft als Preußischer Untertan vom 31. Dezember 1842, in: ebenda, 259–261.
^Opfermann, Ulrich[in German] (1995). ""Mäckeser". Zur Geschichte der Fahrenden im Oberbergischen im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert" ["Mäckeser". On the history of the travellers in the Oberberg region in the 18th and 19th centuries]. Beiträge zur Oberbergischen Geschichte (in German). 5. Gummersbach: 116–128.
^Opfermann, Ulrich[in German] (2010). "Die Jenischen und andere Fahrende. Eine Minderheit begründet sich" [The Yenish and other travellers. A minority is established.]. Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung (in German). 19: 126–150 [148–150].
^Zimmermann, Michael, Rassenutopie und Genozid. Die nationalsozialistische „Lösung der Zigeunerfrage“, Hamburg 1996, S. 153, S. 436. Ulrich Opfermann: Die Jenischen und andere Fahrende. Eine Minderheit begründet sich, in: Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 19 (2010), S. 126–150; ders., Rezension zu: Andrew d’Arcangelis, Die Jenischen – verfolgt im NS-Staat 1934–1944. Eine sozio-linguistische und historische Studie, Hamburg 2006, in: Historische Literatur, Bd. 6, 2008, H. 2, S. 165–168,
^Michael Zimmermann, Rassenutopie und Genozid. Die nationalsozialistische „Lösung der Zigeunerfrage“, Hamburg 1996, 174; Karola Fings/Frank Sparing, Rassismus – Lager – Völkermord. Die nationalsozialistische Zigeunerverfolgung in Köln, Köln 2005, 211.
^Michael Zimmermann, Rassenutopie und Genozid. Die nationalsozialistische „Lösung der Zigeunerfrage“, Hamburg 1996, 314.
^Lewy, Guenther (2001). "Rückkehr nicht erwünscht". Die Verfolgung der Zigeuner im Dritten Reich ["Return undesirable": The persecution of the Gypsies in the Third Reich] (in German). Munich/Berlin. p. 433.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
^Rahmenkredit Stiftung „Zukunft für Schweizer Fahrende“, in: Nationalrat, Sommersession 2001, Sechste Sitzung, 11. Juni 2001. [1]
^Mehr, Mariella (1979). "Jene, die auf nirgends verbriefte Rechte pochen" [Those who insist on rights that are not enshrined anywhere]. In Zülch, Tilman; Duve, Freimut (eds.). In Auschwitz vergast, bis heute verfolgt. Zur Situation der Roma (Zigeuner) in Deutschland und Europa [Gassed in Auschwitz, persecuted to this day. On the situation of the Roma (Gypsies) in Germany and Europe] (in German). Reinbek. pp. 274–287 [276f.] eine Handvoll Sippen, die noch reisen würden [a handful of clans that would still travel]
^Gaillard, Florence (12 December 2007). "Le passé enfin écrit des enfants enlevés en Suisse" [The past finally written of the children abducted in Switzerland]. Le Temps (in French). Geneva. Archived from the original on 19 June 2024., an historical study spanning the years from 1926 to 1973.
^Since autumn 2016, the Swiss federal authorities officially declare: "With the ratification of the Framework Convention of the Council of Europe of 1 February 1995 on the Protection of National Minorities, Switzerland has recognized the Swiss Yenish and Sinti as a national minority—regardless of whether they live travelling or sedentary."[citation needed]
^Bader, Christian (2007). Yéniches: les derniers nomades d'Europe [Yenish: the last nomads of Europe] (in French). L'Harmattan. ISBN978-2-296-03675-8. Ils constituent, aujourd'hui en France, sans doute le groupe le plus volumineux au sein de la communauté des Gens du voyage [Today in France, they constitute without doubt the largest group within the community of Travellers.]
Works cited
Ermolenko, Svetlana; Turchyn, Karina (2021). "Sprachliche Diskriminierung und die Politische Korrektheit in Der Deutschen Sprache" [Linguistic Discrimination and Political Correctness in the German Language]. Philological Treatises (in German). 13 (1): 24–31. doi:10.21272/Ftrk.2021.13(1)-3.
Further reading
Becker, Helena Kanyar (2003). Jenische, Sinti und Roma in der Schweiz [Yenish, Sinti and Roma in Switzerland]. Basler Beitrage zur Geschichtswissenschaft (in German). Vol. 176. Basel: Schwabe. ISBN3-7965-1973-3.
