consist of later immigrants from eastern or central Europe. There are no concrete statistics for the number of Romani speakers, both in Europe and globally. However, a conservative estimate is 3.5 million speakers in Europe and a further 500,000 elsewhere, though the actual number may be considerably higher. This makes Romani the second-largest minority language in Europe, behind Catalan. In regards to the diversity of dialects, Romani works in the same way as most other European languages. Cross-dialect communication is dominated by the following features: All Romani speakers are bilingual, accustomed to borrowing words or phrases from a second language; this makes it difficult to communicate with Romanis from different countries Romani was traditionally a language shared between extended family and a close-knit community. This has resulted in the inability to comprehend dialects from other countries, and is why Romani is sometimes considered to be several different languages. There is no tradition or literary standard for Romani speakers to use as a guideline for their language use. Persecutions Historical persecution One of the most enduring persecutions against the Romani people was their enslavement. Slavery was widely practiced in medieval Europe, including the territory of present-day Romania from before the founding of the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia in the 13th–14th centuries. Legislation decreed that all the Romani living in these states, as well as any others who immigrated there, were classified as slaves. Slavery was gradually abolished during the 1840s and 1850s. The exact origins of slavery in the Danubian Principalities are not known. There is some debate over whether the Romani people came to Wallachia and Moldavia as free men or were brought there as slaves. Historian Nicolae Iorga associated the Roma people's arrival with the 1241 Mongol invasion of Europe and he also considered their enslavement a vestige of that era, in which the Romanians took the Roma from the Mongols and preserved their status as slaves so they could use their labor. Other historians believe that the Romani were enslaved while they were being captured during the battles with the Tatars. The practice of enslaving prisoners of war may have also been adopted from the Mongols. Some Romani may have been slaves of the Mongols or the Tatars or they may have served as auxiliary troops in the Mongol or Tatar armies, but most of them migrated from south of the Danube at the end of the