This paper reviews several adopted approaches for exploring and theorizing linguistic creativity and tries to unravel some of the collective parameters crucial to research on creativity in language use. It then considers the word's etymology and tracks down how the concept historically moved from the area of divine creation to a human skill to a phenomenon tightly linked to language use. It handles basic features of general creativity definitions and demonstrates that creativity tends to be conceptualized in relation to some concise key questions: Who? What? What for? For whom?. The main unit of the paper proposes and revises linguistic approaches to creativity in relation to the key concept of norms. Beginning with Chomsky’s (1972) notion of rule-governed creativity and generative norms, it carries on with a discussion of semantic, lexical and morphological creativity linked to productivity and the norms of word-formation. The paper then reviews recent studies on everyday creativity in first language (L1) use, debating how literariness in literary and ordinary language has to do with shattering expectancies based on settled pragmatic norms. It concludes by abridging how the creativity concept may possibly serve for the analysis of language variation and change that lies at the crossing of systemic, pragmatic and cognitive-psycholinguistic perspectives. It indicates research domains in which creativity has lately become a topic of interest, like multilingualism and code-switching, World Englishes (Wes) and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). In these contexts, the conceptualization of creativity enables the exploration of fluid, mixed and hybrid language uses that defy the norms of one apparently fixed, clearly confined language or linguistic variety.