Excerpts from the Introduction:

This Māgadhabhāsā (Pāḷi) grammar, as it is named, was originally not intended to reach the extent it has now. The initial prospect was to create an informal and more or less makeshift conglomerate of relevant material mainly for personal studies and general use. However, the inspiration roused by the thought about the spiritual merit (puññaṃ) gained by creating and sharing something more fundamental and reliable by investing just some extra labor (quite a bit in the end actually) led to the initial makeshift design being worked upon to lose its rough edges and growing in bulk.

The structure is primarily modelled after that of Kaccāyana and references (incl. page numbers) to works in the Pāḷi language as well as quotations from them are directed to and from the Chaṭṭhasaṅgāyana editions (PDF files) of the Vipassana Research Institute, Igatpuri, India, also commonly known as the Burmese edition (Be), with the exception of two quotations from European editions (Ee). Since traditionally proper names and titles of books are not capitalized in the Pāḷi language, this practice is continued here for the actual Pāḷi texts quoted; however, it is, for obvious reasons, discontinued for such individual Pāḷi words contained in the running text written in English.

The Pāḷi canon does not contain any record about which language the Buddha spoke, either as his native tongue, regarding potential standard dialects, a lingua franca or a koine. As a Sakyan, having possibly been nothing less than “junior allies”28 of the Kosalan kingdom, he possibly spoke an eastern Indic dialect as his native tongue but having received a thoroughgoing education in an aristocratic or royal family, he in all likelihood was multilingual (cf. Edgerton, 1953: 2; Karpik, 2019: 21; Levman, personal communication, April 28, 2020; Rhys Davids, 1911: 153; Warder, 1970/2000: 200). There is also evidence that his clan – the Sakyas – spoke Munda (part of the Austroasiatic language family) and/or Dravidian (Levman, 2019: 64). Be that as it may, as Warder (p. 201) and others pointed out, the Buddha spent most of his time in the kingdom of Kosala and much less so in the Magadhan or others, and it is outside of Magadha where Buddhism at first in the main spread,29 although it expanded significantly already during his lifetime and reached nearly all other ancient Indian countries before the Magadhan supremacy (ca. 410 BCE30 and onwards; Warder: 202). Thus, although we cannot be certain what kind of language the Buddha habitually employed, it is at least safe to assume that he was multilingual. It is also well possible that he made regular use of a more universally established and widespread form of language – such as a pan-Indic high language, koine or lingua franca, the existence of which some scholars have argued for as we have come to see in the foregoing sections. This indeed might have been the Pāḷi language as preserved in the voluminous scriptures of Pāḷi Buddhism as we know them today, described by the tradition throughout under various names, such as māgadhabhāsā. Of that language the following grammar is a study.

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