The article proposes an assessment of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s anthropological linguistics in relation to two major directions in the modern science of language, respectively the diachronic structuralism and the transformational grammar. Starting from a critical examination of these trends in the modern linguistics and of several fundamental concepts such as linguistic structure, linguistic change and creativity, the author shows that none of these linguistic directions strictly corresponds to Humboldtian linguistics. In contrast to these approaches, Humboldt’s linguistic conception seems to anticipate a dynamic type of structuralism, which is able to explain the dynamicity of language’s structures as part of a language history and thus to surpass the synchrony – diachrony dichotomy maintained in the modern linguistics. In the end, the potential of Humboldtian linguistics is exploited and the possibility of distinguishing, at the level of linguistic technique’s concrete manifestation, between three further successive levels of system, norm and linguistic type is presented and illustrated through various examples from Romance languages.