Swedish is spoken both in Sweden and Finland, and Finland is a bilingual country with Swedish as a national language alongside Finnish. This makes it possible to explore the same language in two different societies, and two different languages in the same society. However, few comparative studies have been conducted with parallel datasets in both national languages of Finland. The project Communicative patterns in two languages in Finland therefore compares Finnish and Finland Swedish internally and to Sweden Swedish in similar institutional settings. In this article I present the research area of the project by discussing results from two previous pilot studies.