Against an overall national backdrop of sociolinguistic levelling in European varieties of French, particularly in France, youth vernaculars have sometimes been construed as a major counterexample to this general trend. Reviewing firstly work on dictionaries and lexicons, before moving on to variationist work carried out using behavioral and perceptual approaches and finally some examples of ethnographic work, this paper then seeks to put the French work into perspective through a brief comparison with work in neighboring countries, drawing the reader’s attention to certain themes which appear important outside France but which are apparently absent from work on French youth slang.