The Yenish are an itinerant group in Western and Central Europe who live mostly in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Belgium, and parts of France, roughly centered on the Rhineland. The origins of the Yenish are unknown, though a number of theories for the group's origins have been proposed, including that the Yenish descended from members of the marginalised and vagrant poor classes of society of the early modern period, before emerging as a distinct group by the early 19th century. Most of the Yenish became sedentary in the course of the mid-19th to 20th centuries.