The title of Jim Adams's rich and interesting paper clearly states the key question at the heart of his analysis: ‘Was classical (late republican) Latin a “standard language”?’. In this article, I contextualise some of his answers to this and other related questions he raises by situating them in the context of theoretical discussions of standardisation and recent explorations of its processes and outcomes. In recent years there has been extensive research on linguistic standardisation. This research has broadened the scope of consideration from the now stock examples of modern Western European languages to minoritized languages, multilingual situations and stateless languages, raising the question of whether traditional models and conceptions of standardisation often associated with the creation of a nation‐state can equally be applied to other contexts, including Latin during the late republican and early imperial periods.