While the concepts of ‘standard’ and ‘Koine’ have become central in current discussions of language variation and change in the Classical and especially Post-classical periods, they are surrounded by confusion. In this contribution, I propose to supplement a Koine/standard-based approach by focusing on linguistic norms: while linguistic norms have received some attention in current scholarly work, the different methods to retrieve them have not been explicitly compared, and they have not been based on a firm theoretical understanding of the concept of ‘norm’. On the basis of a new norm typology, I show that the different methods that can be used to retrieve linguistic norms do not overlap: they retrieve different types of norms. Rather than preferring one approach over the other, I suggest that future research may invest in a combined approach.