Afghan general Mahmud of Ghazni early in the 11th century. Mahmud's troops probably pushed the Romani out of northern India and into the area that is now Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran. Population and subgroups Romani population For a variety of reasons many Romanis choose not to register their ethnic identity in official censuses. There are an estimated 10 million Romani people in Europe (as of 2019), although some Romani organizations give estimates as high as 14 million. Significant Romani populations are found in the Balkans, in some Central European states, in Spain, France, Russia and Ukraine. In the European Union, there are an estimated 6 million Romanis. Several million more Romanis may live outside Europe, in particular in the Middle East and in the Americas. Romani homeland There is no single Romani "homeland". A home country for the Romani people has been proposed, under the name Romanistan. Romani subgroups Like the Roma in general, many different ethnonyms are given to subgroups of Roma. Sometimes a subgroup uses more than one endonym, is commonly known by an exonym or erroneously by the endonym of another subgroup. The only name approaching an all-encompassing self-description is Rom. Even when subgroups do not use the name, they all acknowledge a common origin and a dichotomy between themselves and Gadjo (non-Roma). For instance, while the main group of Roma in German-speaking countries refer to themselves as Sinti, their name for their original language is Romanes. Subgroups have been described as, in part, a result of the castes and subcastes in India, which the founding population of Rom almost certainly experienced in their South Asian urheimat. Many groups use names apparently derived from the Romani word kalo or calo, meaning "black" or "absorbing all light". This closely resembles words for "black" or "dark" in Indo-Aryan languages (e.g. Sanskrit काल kāla: "black", "of a dark colour"). Likewise, the name of the Dom or Domba people of North India–to whom the Roma have genetic, cultural and linguistic links–has come to imply "dark-skinned", in some Indian languages. Hence names such as kale and calé may have originated as an exonym or a euphemism for Roma. Other endonyms for Romani include, for example: Ashkali – Albanian-speaking Muslim Roma communities in the Balkans Arlije (also Erlides, Yerli meaning local, from the Turkish word Yerli) in Balkans and Turkey to describe sedentary Muslim roma. Bashaldé – Hungarian-Slovak Roma diaspora in the US