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Pali is a language of the Indo-Aryan family, related to (but probably not descended from) Sanskrit. It may have never been a spoken language. It originated in India as a literary language of mixed vernacular origins. It is now extinct there, but it is still being used by Buddhist scholars in Sri Lanka and in Burma and other South-East Asian countries.
Pali is the sacred language in which the Theravada Buddhist canon was written from the 1st c. BC on. It owed its success to the fact that Buddha (3st c. BC) rejected the use of Sanskrit, the language of the educated Brahmans. Most other written works in Pali are related in some way to said religious texts.
Pali is an inflected language. It has been written in Indic scripts (including Devanagari) and, more recently romanized by the Pali Text Society (located in the United Kingdom). Pali vocabulary includes adapted Sanskrit and Sinhalese words.
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