A shtetl or shtetel (English: /ˈʃtɛtəl/; Yiddish: שטעטל, romanized: shtetl (singular); שטעטלעך, romanized: shtetlekh (plural)) is a Yiddish term for the small towns with predominantly Ashkenazi Jewish populations which existed in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. The term is used in the contexts of peculiarities of former East European Jewish societies as islands within the surrounding non-Jewish populace, and bears certain socio-economic and cultural connotations. Shtetls (or shtetels, shtetlach, shtetelach or shtetlekh) were mainly found in the areas that constituted the 19th-century Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire as well as in Congress Poland, Austrian Galicia, Kingdom of Romania and in the Kingdom of Hungary.