When everything is “awesome” or “lit”, where is the room for words like marvellous and splendid, let alone umda, behtareen and chokha? When words fall into disuse, the journey to the archaic section of the dictionary is only a matter of time. And when that happens collectively to a language, it’s perhaps lost forever. It was this concern for her own dialect of Khari Boli that drove Roorkee-born Akriti Singh to direct Bol, a play that addresses both, our dying languages and a new language emerging thanks to the Internet.

“I realised that when I speak Hindi, I don’t use the same words as my nani would. And moving to another city only means that you move further away from your language because more often than not, we are scared of owning up to our roots. But we think in a certain language, and if we don’t have the words, how are we going to think?” says Singh about the premise of the play she co-wrote with Shaurya Agrawal. It will be staged this Wednesday with a cast that includes Arshad Mumtaz, Pratik Rajen Kothari, Rigved Singh Maurya, Sriparna Chatterjee and Singh.