Pali () is a Middle Indo-Aryan liturgical language native to the Indian subcontinent. It is widely studied because it is the language of the Buddhist Pāli Canon or Tipiṭaka as well as the sacred language of Theravāda Buddhism. Origin and development Etymology The word 'Pali' is used as a name for the language of the Theravada canon. The word seems to have its origins in commentarial traditions, wherein the (in the sense of the line of original text quoted) was distinguished from the commentary or vernacular translation that followed it in the manuscript. K. R. Norman suggests that its emergence was based on a misunderstanding of the compound , with being interpreted as the name of a particular language. The name Pali does not appear in the canonical literature, and in commentary literature is sometimes substituted with , meaning a string or lineage. This name seems to have emerged in Sri Lanka early in the second millennium CE during a resurgence in the use of Pali as a courtly and literary language. As such, the name of the language has caused some debate among scholars of all ages; the spelling of the name also varies, being found with both long "ā" and short "a" , and also with either a retroflex or non-retroflex "l" sound. Both the long ā and retroflex are seen in the ISO 15919/ALA-LC rendering, ; however, to this day there is no single, standard spelling of the term, and all four possible spellings can be found in textbooks. R. C. Childers translates the word as "series" and states that the language "bears the epithet in consequence of the perfection of its grammatical structure". Geographic origin There is persistent confusion as to the relation of to the vernacular spoken in the ancient kingdom of Magadha, which was located around modern-day Bengal. Beginning in the Theravada commentaries, Pali was identified with 'Magahi', the language of the kingdom of Magadha, and this was taken to also be the language that the Buddha used during his life. In the 19th century, the British Orientalist Robert Caesar Childers argued that the true or geographical name of the Pali language was Magadhi Prakrit, and that because pāḷi means "line, row, series", the early Buddhists extended the meaning of the term to mean "a series of books", so pāḷibhāsā means "language of the texts". However, modern scholarship has regarded Pali as a mix