Des innovations lexicales ? Différentes façons d’innover en Ile-de-France

This paper is concerned with what is currently called youth language. In Paris, as in other major western cities, new ways of speaking are driven by young people having other heritage languages than that of the country in question (French in our case), and the question therefore arises what the effects of these socio-historical conditions on the lexicon are. After having presented the MPF corpus (Multicultural Paris French), gathered in as ecological conditions as possible, we discuss how non-standard lexical items were collected in context. Three lexical categories are illustrated: argotic and semantically extended terms, borrowings (mostly from English, Arabic and Romani), and processes such as verlan (backward slang). We conclude by inquiring whether some-thing totally new is emerging.