{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,5,14]],"date-time":"2026-05-14T17:14:31Z","timestamp":1778778871246,"version":"3.51.4"},"reference-count":32,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"5","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,5,14]],"date-time":"2026-05-14T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1778716800000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Computers"],"abstract":"<jats:p>We investigate the linguistic complexity and emotional valence of popular song lyrics across English (n=1491), Spanish (n=307), and German (n=225), using an analytical corpus of 2023 tracks drawn from 2113 deduplicated tracks on Spotify\u2019s weekly Top 200 charts (2019\u20132021). Transformer-based sentiment analysis is combined with complexity-science tools to characterize both the affective content and the structural organization of commercially successful lyrics. A multilingual BERT model reveals a mild negative skew across all three languages (63.7% negative overall); the 1.003-point English\u2013German gap observed under the English-centric VADER lexicon collapses to 0.127 points under BERT, indicating that earlier cross-linguistic sentiment differences are largely measurement artifacts. Word frequency distributions follow Zipf\u2019s law in all three languages (R2&gt;0.96), with English steepest (\u03b1=1.409) and German shallowest (\u03b1=1.181). Detrended fluctuation analysis indicates persistent long-range correlations (H\u22480.66\u20130.76; none of the 50 shuffled surrogates exceeded the observed values), and multifractal singularity spectra are statistically indistinguishable across languages once corpus size is controlled (all pairwise Mann\u2013Whitney p&gt;0.13). Streaming counts within the Top 200 are concentrated (German Gini =0.556) but, given the truncated single-snapshot sample, are reported as within-chart descriptors rather than population-level scaling.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/computers15050315","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,5,14]],"date-time":"2026-05-14T16:27:56Z","timestamp":1778776076000},"page":"315","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Cross-Linguistic Complexity and Language-Specific Sentiment: Multifractal Structure and Emotional Valence in Popular Music Lyrics Across Three Languages"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"15","author":[{"given":"Fateme","family":"Khanipour","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Independent Researcher, Tehran 1477636718, Iran"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-1520-1799","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Zeinab","family":"Shahbazi","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Research Environment of Computer Science (RECS), Kristianstad University, 291 88 Kristianstad, Sweden"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-1115-2504","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Sara","family":"Behnamian","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen, 1350 Copenhagen, Denmark"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0007-6895-1442","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Fatemeh","family":"Fogh","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL 33431, USA"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Nathan","family":"Blood","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL 33431, USA"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,5,14]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","unstructured":"Fell, M., and Sporleder, C. 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