This article examines religious and patriotic languages in digitized letters written by ordinary Finnish people in the Second World War. We combine qualitative and quantitative methods to analyse how religious and patriotic languages were used throughout the war years. Our findings show that the frequency of religious and patriotic vocabulary fluctuated widely during the war. Religious words were most notably connected to the intensity of the warfare, peaking during the periods of heated combat and dropping in the period of stationary warfare. Patriotic words were likewise common during the early periods of combat, but their use waned in the later war years. The analysis of words occurring in close proximity to the religious and patriotic words suggests that this was due to the different functions of the two languages. Religious parlance was essentially a vehicle of private emotional coping, while patriotic style gave a collective meaning to the sacrifices of the war. Religion and patriotism diverged during the war because the collective meaning of the war vanished but the need for emotional comfort persisted until its end.

This article introduces the Finnish Army in World War II Database (FA2W) currently under construction that is being built to study the effects of World War II on Finnish society. The database is a stratified sample of 4,253 representative of the men who served in the Finnish Army in World War II. The data have been gathered from the military service record collection of the Finnish Army, which holds files on practically all draft-age Finnish men of the birth cohort 1903–1926 and around 70% of the birth cohorts 1897–1902. The amount of data is extensive, containing over 60 different variables. The main part of the database consists of men's military careers, comprising longitudinal data on their positions in society and in the army (e.g., civilian/conscript/frontline service), military unit, military branch, task, rank, and service class. Other information includes socio-economic information from the draft and wartime and war experiences, such as wounds, illnesses, medical treatments, death, and honors. In the future the database will be expanded with men’s postwar life trajectories to study the long-term effects of the war.