In Finland and in other Nordic countries, Oriental Studies have not been explicitly tied to colonial and imperial projects in the Middle East. However, any research in human and social sciences engages in acts of worldmaking and is unavoidably positioned ¬– even when it does not actively reproduce, for example, problematic power structures. In this presentation, I focus on disciplinary language ideologies of late 20th century Arabic dialectology by examining Heikki Palva’s (1935¬–2022) contributions to and impact on Finnish and Nordic Oriental Studies. Palva was Professor of Arabic at the University of Göteborg, Sweden in 1970–82 and, subsequently, at the university of Helsinki in 1982–1998. His research focused on Arabic dialects in the Arab East, and as an Arabic dialectologist he was recognized as one of the leading researchers in the field. The early years of Palva's career were a time of disciplinary differentiation in Nordic Middle Eastern research, and Modern Arabic gained traction as a field on its own right. Later, more sociolinguistic perspectives started to become part of the research, while the overall outlook to language still remained structuralistically oriented. In Palva’s reseach, though, language users’ own perspectives to variation were also present from early on. In my paper, I consider to what extent linguistic description seemingly focusing on the abstract structure of language can ultimately be detached from the surrounding social dynamics, and cultural hegemony. I examine the question from the point of view of Nordic research institutions and by considering the conceptual and methodological framework offered by Western linguistics. Throughout the late 20th century, the study of Arabic dialects was largely concentrated in Anglo-European academic spaces. Also concepts and methods had similar cultural, largely eurocentric bias. In this sense, Nordic Oriental Studies focusing on Modern Arabic did not differ that much from their other European counterparts. At the same time Palva's work, for example, already laid ground for changes towards more epistemically sustainable research in the field. This process is still ongoing.