Pāli

Pali is a Middle Indo-Aryan Prakrit, preserved as the sacred language of Theravada Buddhism and the tongue of the Tipitaka canon. It descends from a hybrid of regional Prakrits from around the 200s BCE. Long carried orally, the canon was first committed to writing in Sri Lanka in the first century BCE.

After centuries of decline on the island, the scholar Buddhaghosa revived Pali learning in the 400s with the Visuddhimagga and his commentaries. Pali inscriptions in mainland Southeast Asia may begin as early as the 300s. A renaissance around the Pagan kingdom in the 1000s carried the language through mainland Southeast Asia as dynasties sponsored Theravada monasteries.

Never a vernacular in this period, Pali served as the scholarly and liturgical lingua franca of Theravada lands, written in local scripts such as Burmese, Khmer and Sinhala, and contributed religious and learned loanwords to those languages.