Father in Heaven

I have grown up a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I have spent many days listening to the words of the Prophet, his counselors, and those that preside in the church. They've always been really special in my life, so being able to study those words in a linguistic sense made me really happy.

I decided to take a look at the words that we use to describe our Heavenly Father. There is a lot that I know about Jesus Christ, but because our Heavenly Father is such a sacred being, there is little that I fully know about him that I haven't learned through Jesus' example. I decide to take this opportunity to see the many different words that have been used to describe our Heavenly Father.

Heavenly Father 

This one seems the most common to me, and if you look at the graph you can see why. 

I started off with this word and noticed that it had peaked significantly this past decade. Did that mean that we didn't talk about our Heavenly Father before now? I hypothesized that the answer to this is no, but that we had different words to use to describe him.

Father in Heaven

Even though it is only a slight variance to the phrasing above, it still shows a different in usage. Interestingly enough, both of them were on the rise until they dropped off in this last couple of conference.

God

To me, this is a little more harsh than Heavenly Father. It is still a common phrase, but wouldn't be the first word that I would go to. There is a nice curve around the usage of God in General Conference in tokens, but if you go to the corpus search you notice that it is in the decline in the usage per million.

Elohim

This isn't a very common name for our Heavenly Father in day to day speech, but I wanted to know what the usage would be in general conference. It was very infrequent both in tokens and in per million. The highest token was only 12 uses in one conference.

Eternal Father

This shows a similar graph to God, and if you look at the corpus you can see that the usage is slightly declining. The similarities between the two could be because of the phrase God the Eternal Father; when looking at the examples there were very few where God and Eternal Father weren't collocates.

Going by these findings, I would say that Heavenly Father is the more modern name to reference our Heavenly Father. It brings about the kindness that we associate with our Father in Heaven. 

Outside the Church

I wanted to take a look at the uses of God and Heavenly Father outside of the church, so I ran both of them in Coca (God, Heavenly Father). The graphs below show the usage of both of those words by Genre and Year.

It was interesting to see that while Fiction and Magazine have the highest usage of God, Academic had a decently high usage as well.

This is not surprising in the fact that God is less in use now then it use to be. The usage is high compared to Heavenly Father in the past couple of years. Heavenly Father peaks in Spoken and Fiction but is really low in the other three genres. 

By year, Heavenly Father has dropped in usage since 1995-1999. When I think of Heavenly Father, it seems like a more term used within the church; not something that would be used unless you were a member.