The History and Development of Pali Language

Pali language

Pāli is a Middle Indo-Aryan language of the Indian subcontinent. It is best known as the language of many of the earliest extant Buddhist scriptures, as collected in the Pāḷi Canon. Pali is a literary language of the Prakrit language family and was first written down in Sri Lanka in the first century BCE. Many Theravada sources refer to the Pāli language as "Magadhan" or the "language of Magadha". This identification first appears in the commentaries, and may have been an attempt by Buddhists to associate themselves more closely with the Mauryans.

Relationship of the Buddha's speech to Pāli

Relationship of the Buddha's speech to Pāli, the Canon was eventually transcribed and preserved entirely in it, while the commentarial tradition that accompanied it was translated into Sinhalese and preserved in local languages for several generations. After the death of the Buddha, Pali may have evolved among Buddhists out of the language of the Buddha as a new artificial language. B.Bodhi: While the language is not identical to what Buddha himself would have spoken, it belongs to the same broad linguistic family as those he might have used and originates from the same conceptual matrix.

Today Pāli is studied mainly to gain access to Buddhist scriptures, and is frequently chanted in a ritual context. The secular literature of Pāli historical chronicles, medical texts, and inscriptions is also of great historical importance. Virtually every word in Pāḷi has cognates in the other Prakritic Middle Indo-Aryan languages. The Pali language's resemblance to Sanskrit is often exaggerated by comparing it to later Sanskrit compositions – which were written centuries after Sanskrit ceased to be a living language, and are influenced by developments in Middle Indic.