Pali (IAST: Pāḷi) is a Middle Indo-Aryan dialect or prakrit. 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 by T. W. Rhys Davids of the Pali Text Society.