Linguistics Career

I have a Master's degree in Linguistics/TESL (2012) from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Illinois in the United States, and a Bachelor's in Linguistics from the University of Ìbàdàn (2005). I’m currently pursuing a PhD program also in Linguistics.

I am also currently a Chevening Research Fellow (2019) at the British Library in London, working on the African language print collections from the 19th Century. I had a Fulbright Scholarship in 2009 to Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

My language work and interests focus on Nigerian and African languages documentation and digitization, through lexicography, activism, and direct action. Since 2005, I have led, championed, or been involved in a number of projects and activities to help improve the revitalization of African languages on the internet, fueled by the conviction that if African languages can be better compatible with technology, and thrive online, the effect will be net positive for the languages themselves into the next generation.

In 2011, I led an online advocacy to pressure Twitter to add Yorùbá to the languages in which the platform is being translated. This led to the annual #TweetYorubaDay event organized around the International Day of Indigenous Languages in February.

In March 2015, I founded YorubaName.com, which is the first online multimedia dictionary of Yorùbá that is free, accessible around the world, and crowdsourced. The project was funded through an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign through which we raised $5000. It continues to be supported by a team of volunteers, linguists, and tech hands.

In 2016, we launched the first free tonemarking software for Yorùbá and Igbo to help diacritic use on the internet. Later at Google in, I helped work on GBoard, the mobile diacritic marker for Android devices which was released in 2017.

Between November 2015 to July 2016, I led a team to create the Nigerian English voice at Google in Nigeria. The Nigerian English accent project was launched on Google Assistant, Maps, and Bolo in July of 2019. I also worked at Google (in Lagos, Madrid, and London) between February and December 2019 on other Nigerian language projects.

While at Google, In 2016 and also in 2019, I helped change the mistranslation of Èṣù, a Yorùbá deity, on Google Translate.

In 2017, through the Yorùbá Names Project, we launched TTSYoruba.com, the first text-to-speech application for Yorùbá which is also free to use.

In 2018, I worked with the BBC Academy to help localize the Journalistic Style Guides into Nigerian languages Yorùbá and Igbo, ahead of the setting up of the Nigerian language services.

In 2018, I worked as a lexicographer with Oxford University Press Dictionaries as a lexicographer and later as consultant on its Nigerian English and Nigerian language projects. 29 new Nigerian English words were added to the OED in early 2020.

I have also led teams working on other lexicography projects like YorubaWord.com and IgboName.com.

I also continue to work individually, with groups, and with other institutions online and offline, on projects that continue to advance the status of Nigerian languages on the internet. One of them, in April 2020, produced a paper on Automatic Diacritic Restoration for Yorùbá. More of my publications and research in this direction can be found on the Academic Publications page.

I write in Yorùbá and English and translate between both languages, especially Nigerian language literature. My own work has also been translated into Korean, Spanish, and Italian.

I live in Lagos, Nigeria, with my wife Temie, and two children. I am working on a couple of books on my experience in language advocacy and language technology.

Linguistics Career

Further reading

Writing Bio