pali

Pali is an ancient Middle Indo-Aryan language that serves as the liturgical and textual language of Theravada Buddhism. It is the language of the Pali Canon, or Tipitaka, the principal scriptures of Theravāda, traditionally divided into three baskets: Vinaya Pitaka, Sutta Pitaka, and Abhidhamma Pitaka. The canonical texts have been preserved and studied for centuries in Buddhist communities across South and Southeast Asia.

Pali developed from dialects associated with the Magadhi Prakrit spoken in eastern India during the late first millennium BCE. The Theravāda canon was likely composed in that milieu and later standardized, especially in Sri Lanka, where it was first committed to writing in the first millennium BCE to CE. The language is closely related to other Prakrits and to Magadhi.

Linguistically, Pali features a Middle Indo-Aryan grammar with noun inflection, verb conjugation, case endings, and postpositions, forming a relatively analytic syntax. Its lexicon incorporates many Sanskrit loanwords but with distinct sound shifts and local usage. Scholarly Pali is typically presented in a standard literary form with diacritics in academic sources.

Script and transmission have varied by region. Historically, Pali texts were transmitted orally and later written in scripts such as Sinhala and Devanagari, among others. In modern scholarship and practice, Pali is published in multiple scripts and in Latin transliteration to facilitate study and international access.

Today, Pali remains the core liturgical language of Theravada Buddhism and a key subject of academic study. It is taught in monasteries and universities worldwide, enabling access to early Buddhist doctrine and historical texts.