Kola Tunbosun Is The Brain Behind “Yorùbá Name Project” At YorubaName.com

Kọ́láwọlé Ọlátúbọ̀sún is a teacher, writer, and linguist whose work and influence cuts across education, literature and linguistics.

Stargist.com presents 10 things about the linguist and Full-bright scholar.

See below:

1 Kola was born on the 22nd of September 1981 in Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria.

2 He holds a Masters in Linguistics from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and a BA from the University of Ibadan. He also studied briefly at Moi University, Eldoret, Kenya, in April 2005, as part of a MacArthur Foundation-sponsored Socio-Cultural Exchange Programme. He was granted a Fulbright scholarship in 2009 through which he taught Yoruba at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in 2009–10.

3 In 2012, he started an online campaign to demand that Twitter include Yoruba (his mother tongue) in the list of languages into which Twitter was being translated: 1 March 2012 was declared “the Tweet Yoruba Day” to call attention to the matter. The campaign continued on 1 March 2013 and again on 1 March 2014. In August 2014, Twitter announced through a tweet that they were now adding Yoruba (along with Esperanto) to the translation platform, ending the two years of advocacy.

4 Tubosun founded the “Yorùbá Name Project” at YorubaName.com in March 2015 after months of crowdfunding as an effort to document all names in Yoruba in an accessible multimedia format.

5 He is also involved in setting up a version for Igbo language at IgboName.com

6 On 8 August 2015, the project released a free Yorùbá Keyboard software for Mac and Windows to allow its users type in Yorùbá language on the internet with an update to cater for Igbo in July 2016.

7 Between October 2015 and July 2016, Tubosun worked as a Linguist at Google with the Speech team as Project Manager.

8 In October 2015, he was nominated for the CNN African Journalists Award for his travel piece Abeokuta’s Living History, first published at KTravula.com and he was the first ever blogger on the award shortlist.

9 In January 2016, he was chosen as a recipient of a Premio Ostana “Special Prize” for Mother Tongue Literature and he was the first African to be so honoured by the organisation.

10 He is married to Temie Giwa-Tubosun and they have a son, Eniafe.