Delhiwale: The new Dilli speak

“Stephen, his blood wooed by grace of language and gesture, blushed

“Stephen, his blood wooed by grace of language and gesture, blushed.”

Delhiwale: The new Dilli speak

— James Joyce in Ulysses

Every generation is wooed by its own language. It falls for fresh words, gives inherited words new meanings, and discovers slogans and catchphrases that become the soundtrack of its youth.

If you wanted to hear Delhi’s newest words in circulation, Jantar Mantar was recently the place to stand. Students had gathered beside the centuries-old solar observatory to protest paper leaks in competitive exams. The air was thick with contemporary slogans, many destined for Instagram, alongside words already entering Delhi’s everyday speech.

Every decade, Delhi sounds a little different. A decade or two ago, college students called anything impressive jhakaas. The word sexy became a generic compliment, whether for a plate of rajma-chawal or a new pair of Kolhapuri chappals. Text messages had shrunk you into u. Smileys made from colons and brackets had entered text messages. Hinglish, and increasingly Hindi, were acquiring a new confidence.

Today’s vocabulary sounds different. A few years ago, hardly any Delhiwale used words like meme, mid, OG, aura, kuchu puchu, no shit, no cap, or delulu. Today they are as commonly heard on the Delhi Metro as bhayya and bhaisaab. College-going commuters animatedly chat about reels, and sometimes make them right in the coach, even as the Metro repeatedly warns against filming reels within its premises.

You do not have to enter a college campus to hear this new language. A glance at an ordinary WhatsApp conversation would do. Business student Ashtika, who was not among the Jantar Mantar protesters, kindly shared one such conversation for this dispatch at her home in the NCR suburbs (see photo). A compulsive maker of Instagram reels, she uses many of the same words that now drift through Delhi’s colleges and Metro coaches.

Back at Jantar Mantar, alongside the new lingo, unprintable profanities also echoed through the air. They might have sounded like the language of Gen Z, but they belong to no single generation. Their parents and grandparents spoke them too. What has changed is the journey of those words. Once confined to hostel rooms and street corners, the words were recorded there and endlessly replayed on social media. Young women spoke them as freely as the young men beside them, looking straight into the camera.

The fact is that the 18th-century solar observatory has watched generations come and go. One day Gen Z, too, will grow old. Another restless generation will then gather at the site with words and phrases yet to be invented. Jantar Mantar will again watch Delhi invent yet another way of speaking.