Rate My Professor Eldin Milak

Milak's research focuses on sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and social semiotics, examining honorifics, kinship terms, teknonymy, geononymy, politeness, script practices, and their impacts on personal and social identities in South Korea and the Balkans. His interests include translingual practices of youth, AI accent modification tools, racial blindness in sociolinguistic arenas, urban semiotics of Koreanness in Western Australia, masks as semiotic devices, and names in the subjectivization of Korean women. He has published in leading journals such as Discourse, Context and Media, Language and Communication, and Applied Linguistics. Notable works include the co-edited volume Becoming a Linguist: Advice from Key Thinkers in Language Studies (Routledge, 2024), featuring contributions from Noam Chomsky; “Call me by my name”: Names, address, and the subjectivization of Korean women (2022); Translingual online identities in the global South: The construction of local ‘gang cultures’ in the social media spaces of Balkan and South Korean artists (2022); Meeting standards: (Re)colonial and subversive potential of AI modification (2024, First Runner-Up award); and Between play and precarity: translingual practices of youth in Bosnia and Herzegovina (2025). Milak moderates theory reading groups and podcasts on sociolinguistics, contributing to mentorship for linguists from the Global South.