APB: Non English Language Slang

[Douglas G. Wilson]

>Can anyone help? I am looking for an overview, an article on or indeed the
>history - either in English or French (my language 'abilities' stop there)
>of non-anglophone slang, or any aspect thereof.

If I understand the question right, I suppose one can employ the catalogue
of one's local library.

For example: my local campus (U. Pittsburgh) library catalogue (on-line)
shows 75 items in response to the keywords <<"French" AND "slang">>.

A few examples:

Title:  A sociolinguistic history of Parisian French / R. Anthony
Lodge.
Author: Lodge, R. Anthony.
Published:      Cambridge, UK ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press,
2004.

Title:  Les mots et la chose : le grand livre des petits mots inconvenants
/ Jean-Claude Carrière.
Author: Carrière, Jean-Claude.
Published:      [Paris] : Plon, 2002.

Title:  Argot, verlan et tchatches / Pierre Merle.
Author: Merle, Pierre.
Published:      Toulouse : Éditions Milan, c1997.

Title:  The vocabulary of modern French : origins, structure and
function.
Author: Wise, Hilary.
Published:      London ; New York : Routledge, 1997.

Title:  Le français non conventionnel en Suisse romande : étude
sociolinguistique menée à Neuchâtel et à Genève / Giuseppe Manno.
Author: Manno, Giuseppe, 1964-
Published:      Bern ; New York : P. Lang, c1994.

Title:  Street French : how to speak and understand French slang / by David
Burke.
Author: Burke, David, 1956-
Published:      New York : Wiley, c1987.

Title:  La puce à l'oreille : anthologie des expressions populaires avec
leur origine / Claude Duneton.
Author: Duneton, Claude, 1935-
Edition:        Nouv. éd., rev. et augm.
Published:      [Paris] : Balland, c1985.

With <<"German" AND "slang">>, 34 items, including:

Title:  Historische deutsche Studentensprache. English German student
jargon in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries / [by Helmut Henne and
Georg Objartel ; translated by Alan Cornell].
Author: Henne, Helmut.
Published:      Berlin ; New York : Walter de Gruyter, [1983?].

Title:  German-American handbook; a collection of current idioms,
colloquialisms, familiar quotations, localisms, dialectal and slang
expressions, and words not generally found in German-English dictionaries,
by Edmund P. Kremer ...
Author: Kremer, Edmund Philipp.
Published:      Chicago, Philadelphia [etc.] J.B. Lippincott Company [c1939]

... and a bunch of books in German, of course.

I don't know which if any of these would be appropriate. There are also
plain slang/argot dictionaries without much discussion: their
bibliographies would probably provide some useful items.

-- Doug Wilson