Pali (IAST: Pāḷi) is a Midle Indo-Aryan language or prakrit of India. It is best known as the language of the earliest extant Buddhist canon, the Pāḷi Canon (Pāḷi: Tipitaka), and as the liturgical language of Theravada Buddhism. Pāli has since been written in a variety of scripts, from the Brahmic family scripts through to a romanised form devised with the research and contributions of Robert Caesar Childers and T. W. Rhys Davids, both of the Pali Text Society.