The article examines the intralingual borrowings from traditional argot as a key source of the formation of French commun youth argot. The relevance of the article stems from the comprehensive nature of the argotisation of youth speech in France over the last two decades. The research material is the linguistic corpus of youth oral speech Multicultural Paris French (Français Parisien Multiculturel) collected under the supervision of the French linguist F. Gadet.