The city of Cuenca, located south of the Ecuadorian Andes, has been built as a syncretic space due to the historical evolution and the contribution of different cultures. This urban constitution brings with it practices, imaginaries and traditions where its inhabitants meet and identify with others. In this framework of encounters and identifications over time, language acts as an intercultural construct that shows a multiple and diverse world inhabited by alterities.

Young people are part of this great urban mosaic, denoting cultural and linguistic particularities. This is how the so-called jargons are nuanced, which represent a revitalizing resource for communication and endow those who practice it with special characteristics. It is a segment of social speech that subverts the linguistic and cultural dynamics of society, in which desires, utopias and identities coexist. Young people reject the adult world, its value system, its way of life and its culture. Hence the importance of knowing and assessing aspects related to the interaction between different youth groups, the presence of foreign and vernacular speech, the influence of communication media and technological equipment, which promote a significant change in language.

Undoubtedly, areas such as the body and sexuality, alcohol, tobacco and drugs, love and friendship, urban tribes, among others, generate and
they enhance meanings that deserve a critical and reflective reading by the reader, to approach a generation that has its own particular ways of perceiving and acting on daily life.

These relationships and connections that operate between language, the city and the
young people travel in the Dictionary of juvenile language, which compiles around
of 5000 linguistic forms, evidencing the personal and collective tensions of a generation that seeks its recognition and inclusion in the contemporary scaffolding. It constitutes an authentic memory, a linguistic and cultural archive that accounts for the history of a city, the region and the country in the last twenty years.