At every level of the language (phonetic, lexical, morphological and syntactic), Mateiu Caragiale's prose and poetry display features of the standard norm of the epoch (often dialectal) as well as to the dominant norm of the epoch, the author oscillating permanently between the two of them. To adequately interpret the language peculiarities of the author's works, one needs to distinguish clearly between the epoch norm (the literary norm of a certain period, subsequently turned into archaism) and the dominant norm.