The conceptions of a linguistic norm for non-linguists form the focus of this article. These conceptions manifest themselves as mental values in the speakers’ minds and can be viewed as implicit reference values of linguistic judgements. There will hereby be an attempt to reconstruct the conceptual contours of people without any academic background in linguistics and to illustrate which criteria play a role in the assessments given and which structural domains can even be assessed. With respect to the method employed here, the study builds on the qualitative content analysis used for extracting and interpreting data. The result of which forms a categorical system that has been constructed deductively and rechecked inductively by the material. The system of categories constructed, which is empirically based on 56 qualitative interviews, also forms the data’s interpretative framework. With the aid of the acquired results, it is shown that non-linguists certainly have a clear picture of what constitutes a good language or how a good language should be; it is closely oriented on written language, invariant, understandable, and has a high communicative scope. In this way, a complex and multilayered conception of linguistic norms can be established. The contours of which will be sketched in this article.