Kola Tubosun has become the first African to receive the the Premio Ostana International Award for Scriptures in the Mother Tongue (Il Premio Ostana Internazionale Scritture in Lingua Madre 2016).He was named earlier this week and would receive his prize in Italy in June 2016.
This is a Prize organized by the Culture of the Chambra D’Oc in Italy and is given for the defense of an indigenous language, and for educational and informative activities by the recipient to protect it.
Past winners of this International Prize include Jaques Thiers (2015), Lance David Henson (2014), Mehmet Altun (2013), Harkaitz Cano (2011), Witi Tame Ihimaera (2010), among many notable others.
In January 2015, he founded YorubaName.com, a portal to document all the names in Yorùbá language with hopes of improving the stock of the language and its use on the internet. One of the project’s initial accomplishments is to release a free tone-marking keyboard software to allow more appropriate writing of Yorùbá on the internet and save it from extinction. He is currently the head of lexicography on the project, among other advisory roles.
The father and husband founded the Tweet Yoruba Movement and the annual “Tweet Yoruba Day” to pressurize Twitter into making the platform useable for Yorùbá speakers, and to create awareness for the usage of Yorùbá on the internet respectively. In August 2014, Twitter facilitated Yorùbá translation. Túbọ̀sún has been an active translator on several internet portals previously available only in English and the world’s ‘main languages’.
Tubosun lives in Lagos with his family.
