Pali is a Middle Indo-Aryan language that is in the Prakrit language group and was indigenous to the Indian subcontinent. It is a dead language that is widely studied because it is the language of many of the earliest extant Buddhist scriptures as collected in the Pali Canon, or Tipitaka, and it is the liturgical language of Theravada Buddhism as practiced in Myanmar / Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Sri Lanka.