Air India Express turns Indian English into a dictionary - Spikes Asia 2026 Grand Prix

Air India Express, the low-cost arm of Air India, needed to stand for more than cheap fares in a crowded aviation market. India is the world's second-largest English-speaking nation, yet its everyday 'Inglish' — words like 'biscoot' and 'one-by-two' — had never been collected or celebrated by a brand.

Turn India's unwritten everyday English into a real dictionary — witty definitions, Sohrai art — so a budget airline owns a national language conversation.

Juice/TBWA wrote and designed 'The Inglish Dictionary': a limited-edition hardback plus a free digital edition at airindiaexpress.com/inglish-dictionary, defining Indian-English phrases with humour and illustrating them in the Sohrai style of indigenous Jharkhand wall painters. Launched in 2025, it spread through the airline's own channels and entered global award shows.

Won a Grand Prix and two Silvers at Spikes Asia 2026, with over 25 million downloads and digital impressions within months of launch; earlier honours at the Kyoorius Design Awards 2025, The Drum Awards 2025 and ONE Asia 2025, plus a Cannes Lions 2025 run across seven categories.

India's everyday English is a language of its own: 'biscoot', the chaotic cousin of biscuit that crumbles into tea when you least expect it; 'one-by-two', the way a single restaurant dish is magically split into two; 'Foreign Return', the label for Indians who come home from abroad; 'time pass', anything done just to kill time. Air India Express and Juice/TBWA collected these words and published them as 'The Inglish Dictionary'.

The dictionary was designed as a celebration rather than a correction: each entry got a witty definition, and the pages were illustrated in the Sohrai painting style of indigenous Jharkhand artists, pairing the humour of Indian English with the visual language of rural India. It launched in 2025 as a limited-edition hardback collectible and a free digital edition at airindiaexpress.com/inglish-dictionary, aimed at Indians, the diaspora and international travellers alike.

The campaign positioned the low-cost carrier as India's most culturally engaged airline. Siddhartha Butalia, its chief marketing officer, called it 'a cultural project curated as an extension of our brand proposition — celebrating diversity and inclusivity while reinforcing the spirit of exploration intrinsic to travel'.

Within months the work drew more than 25 million downloads and digital impressions, and the honours followed: a Grand Prix and two Silvers at Spikes Asia 2026, awards at Kyoorius and The Drum Awards 2025, recognition at ONE Asia 2025, and a Cannes Lions 2025 entry across categories from Social Behaviour and Culture Engagement to Book and Editorial Design.

The dictionary turns a brand into an archive: instead of an ad about India, Air India Express produces the object India's English speakers immediately recognise as theirs.

Indian English is a daily, shared intimacy — collecting it feels like a favour and a tribute, not a sales pitch.

The Sohrai-inspired artwork gives the project a visual identity no competitor can copy and links an airline to indigenous craft heritage.

A free digital edition with shareable entries turns every reader into a distributor, which is how one launch grew to 25 million interactions.

Instead of claiming 'India is in our heart', a brand can prove it by giving a shared but unwritten language official form — cultural insight turned into a product people want to keep and share.

The Inglish Dictionary became Air India Express's flagship cultural asset and one of the most decorated Asian campaigns of the cycle, from Spikes Asia 2026's top prize to Cannes Lions 2025 shortlists. It also demonstrated a repeatable model: rather than buying attention, the airline made itself the custodian of a language its audience already loves, and let the object carry the message.