The Dutch translation of the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) 2007 dictionary

The words we use in everyday language reveal our thoughts, feelings, personality, and motivations. Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) is a software program to analyse text by counting words in 66 psychologically meaningful categories that are catalogued in a dictionary of words. This article presents the Dutch translation of the dictionary that is part of the LIWC 2007 version. It describes and explains the LIWC instrument and it compares the Dutch and English dictionaries on a corpus of parallel texts. The Dutch and English dictionaries were shown to give similar results in both languages, except for a small number of word categories. Correlations between word counts in the two languages were high to very high, while effect sizes of the differences between word counts were low to medium. The LIWC 2007 categories can now be used to analyse Dutch language texts.