Kola Tubosun

Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún (; born 22 September 1981) is a Nigerian linguist, writer, translator, scholar, and cultural activist.

His work and influence span the fields of education, language technology, literature, journalism, and linguistics.

Tubosun was born in Ibadan, Nigeria, in September 1981.

At the University of Ibadan, he was a campus journalist and rose to the position of president of the Union of Campus Journalists, which he led from 2002 to 2004.

He also studied briefly at Moi University, Eldoret, Kenya, in April 2005, as part of a MacArthur Foundation-sponsored Socio-Cultural Exchange Program.

Tubosun has contributed to Nigerian creative writing since 2005, through poetry, travel writing, essay, prose, travel writing and literary criticism.

His work has appeared in the International Literary Quarterly, Sentinel Poetry, Brittle Paper, Ake Review, Popula, NTLitMag, and Enkare Review.

In 2009, he was a Fulbright scholar, and he taught Yoruba at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville until 2010.

His debut collection of poetry/travelogue Edwardsville by Heart covers this period.

In 2010, while still in the US, he worked as a volunteer adult literacy tutor, with resettled immigrants, at the International Institute of St. Louis, Missouri.

He holds a master's degree in Linguistics from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (2012) and a BA from the University of Ibadan (2005).

In 2012, he completed a master's degree in Linguistics/TESL and returned to Lagos, Nigeria, to take up a job as a high-school teacher of English language.

In 2012, he led a successful campaign to have Twitter include Yoruba in the list of languages into which the platform was being translated.

He worked as the pioneering editor of a literary magazine of new writing from Nigerian and Africa called NTLitMag, from 2012 to 2015.

For a few years between 2015 and 2019, he worked as a linguist at Google Nigeria first as a Speech Linguistics Project Manager from 2015 to 2016, and later as a Project Manager for Natural language processing tasks in African languages in 2019.

His work of advocacy has focused on the role of African languages in technology, education, literature, governance, and entertainment.

He founded the Yorùbá Names Project in 2015, a lexicography project, to show how technology can help in revitalizing local languages.

As a writer, he has produced work in travel writing, travel poetry, essays on literature, scholarly writings, journalism, and fiction.

In March 2015, he founded the "Yorùbá Names Project" at YorubaName.com as an effort to document all names in Yoruba in an accessible multimedia format.

The project also released a free Yorùbá Keyboard software for Mac and Windows to allow its users type in Yorùbá language and Igbo on the internet.

Tubosun's team at Google Nigeria was behind the Nigerian English voice/accent on Google platforms.

In November 2015, he co-edited as well as Aké Review, the literary publication of the Aké Arts and Book Festival, with Kolade Arogundade.

From 2015 to 2016, while he taught as a school teacher, he edited two issues of The Sail, an anthology of creative works of high school students.

He is the recipient of the 2016 Premio Ostana "Special Prize" for Writings in the Mother Tongue (Ostana Premio Scritture in Lingua Madre) for his work in language advocacy.

He writes in Yoruba and English, and is currently the Africa editor of the Best Literary Translations anthology, published by Deep Vellum.

In 2017, he collaborated with OrishaImage to create Yorùbá Melody, a multilingual 90 minutes free Yorùbá language "audio phrasebook for Olórìṣà and cultural tourists".

The audio phrasebook was released in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

He has also worked as a consultant for Oxford English Dictionary (OED) since 2018 on Nigerian English and Yoruba entries.

From September 2019 to September 2020, he was a Chevening Fellow at the British Library in London as a Research Fellow on the Library's African language printed collection from the 19th Century.

The voice was launched in July 2019.

His collaboration at Google was helpful in getting Nigerian language diacritics into GBoard, and also correcting the mistranslation of the Esu, the Yoruba trickster god, on Google Translate.

He has also worked with Google Arts & Culture on some of its exhibits in Nigeria and Kenya.

Some new words from Nigerian English were added to the OED in December 2019.

In August 2019, a fourth language was added: German.

He also worked with BBC Academy to help localize the Journalistic Style Guide of the BBC into Igbo, Yoruba, and Nigerian Pidgin, ahead of its maiden broadcast in those Nigerian languages.

In honour of UNESCO's declaration of 2019 as the International Year of Indigenous Languages, Tubosun, through The YorubaName Project in collaboration with Rising Voices created @DigiAfricanLang, a twitter rotation curation account featuring scholars and professionals working in African-language documentation and revitalization across the continent.

In September 2020, he was appointed Programme Director of Yoruba Academy in Ibadan.

Tubosun is known for his work in linguistics, technology, and language advocacy.

He has written extensively on the need to empower Nigerian languages, and Nigerian English, to function effectively in education, technology, governance, and literature.

He has also engaged in projects in furtherance of these objectives.