Language & Technology
Digital humanities platforms, archival projects, and technology advocacy — all working toward the same goal: ensuring Yorùbá and other African languages can exist fully in the digital world.
The Yorùbá Names Lexicography Initiative — a Nigerian non-profit working to support the revitalisation of Nigerian languages through technology, archiving, lexicography, and advocacy.
Founded in 2015, the initiative began as a crowdsourced Indiegogo campaign and has grown into four active platforms: YorubaName.com, the first multimedia archive of Yorùbá names with audio pronunciations; IgboNames.com, its Igbo-language counterpart with over 10,000 names and growing; YorubaWord.com, a monolingual dictionary of Yorùbá; and TTSYoruba.com, a text-to-speech tool for Yorùbá. The initiative also produced free Yorùbá and Igbo tone-marking keyboard software for Mac and Windows — enabling millions of speakers to write correctly in their languages on standard devices.
Led the 2019 launch of the Nigerian English voice accent on Google Assistant and Google Maps — the first recognition of Nigerian English dialect by a major technology company. Also served as consultant for the Oxford English Dictionary's 2020 inclusion of 29 Nigerian English entries.
The Google launch attracted global coverage. The OED work represented a landmark moment for Nigerian English as a formally documented variety of the language, with entries including words such as danfo, okada, and agbada.
Led the successful campaign to include Yorùbá as a supported interface language on Twitter — completing translation of the platform's full standard glossary and culminating in the 2014 launch.
The campaign attracted global coverage and inspired similar efforts for other African languages. At the time of launch, Yorùbá became one of the few African languages officially supported as a Twitter interface language, making the platform accessible to millions of Yorùbá speakers in their own tongue.
Led the Black Orpheus Revisited project — digitising and preserving the complete run of the influential literary journal Black Orpheus (1957–1975), one of the most important platforms for African and Caribbean literature of the twentieth century.
Funded by the Open Society Foundations, the project draws from Túbọ̀sún's personal collection of the original magazines. The digitised archive is now freely accessible online, rescuing a vital record of mid-century African literary history from physical deterioration. The project was featured in The World of Interiors, September 2025, and is the subject of the essay "Beier's Market".
View the archive →Co-developed the ÌròyìnSpeech multi-purpose Yorùbá speech corpus — a foundational open-source dataset for Yorùbá natural language processing and automatic speech recognition.
First presented at Interspeech 2020 in Shanghai as part of a collaboration with Google Research, and expanded through the 2023 arXiv publication. The corpus is part of a broader effort to build the AI infrastructure needed for African languages to participate in the machine learning era. Also co-authored improving Yorùbá diacritic restoration (ICLR 2020 African NLP Workshop) and contributed to the 2023 roadmap for African language technologies published in Cell Patterns.
ÌròyìnSpeech on arXiv →Literary-journalistic platform for new creative writing and journalism from Africa — co-founded as part of The Brick House Cooperative, a media co-op of nine independent publications. Túbọ̀sún serves as editor-in-chief and publisher.
In addition to publishing poetry, fiction, essays, and translations, OlongoAfrica has launched its own book imprint (debuting with An African Abroad), produced the Multilingual Anthology for International Mother Tongue Day, and maintained an ongoing archive of the Black Orpheus digitisation project.
Visit OlongoAfrica →Co-founder of Flaming Hydra — an independent, writer-owned publishing platform and collective, operating outside the traditional publishing infrastructure.
Flaming Hydra publishes essays, criticism, fiction, and journalism from writers who retain ownership and control of their work. Túbọ̀sún contributes a regular column to the platform.
Read the column →Personal blog and writing archive — home to travelogues, essays, book reviews, and cultural commentary spanning Nigeria, the UK, the US, South Korea, Italy, and Spain.
One of the longest-running personal writing archives by a Nigerian writer online. The site serves as a record of Túbọ̀sún's intellectual and creative development over two decades, and contains writing that predates his formal publication career.
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