The Words of Morality: An Italian Adaptation of the Moral Foundations Dictionary 2.0 for the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count

The present study provides an Italian-adapted version of the Moral Foundations Dictionary (MFD) 2.0, namely Italian version of the MFD (it-MFD), for use in the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count software. The MFD 2.0 was translated and adapted from English into Italian following a multistep process. Subsequently, the reviewers compared the output with the original text to identify semantic discrepancies. Independent judges then evaluated the relevance of each word to the five moral foundations, and only the words assessed as both relevant and with a high level of agreement between the judges were included in the final version. The resulting it-MFD comprises 2,881 words. To evaluate the tool's effectiveness, we applied it to a sample of salient texts originally written in Italian and for which official English translations were available. The results are presented and discussed.