Geoffrey Stephen Hull (born 6 September 1955) is an Australian linguist, ethnologist and historian who has made contributions to the study of Romance, Celtic, Slavonic, Semitic, Austronesian and Papuan languages, in particular to the relationship between language and culture.
Of English and Scots ancestry on his father's side, his maternal family belonged to the Latin community of Egypt (of mixed Maltese, Venetian, Triestine and French descent) which left that country during the post-war period of nationalization (1946–1957).[1] He grew up familiar with the large range of languages spoken in his extended family (French, Maltese, Italian and various dialects of Italy, Occitan, Slovene, Greek and Arabic).[2]
Hull studied arts at the University of Sydney (1974–1982), completing a doctorate in historical linguistics after dialectological research in Italy and Switzerland. His PhD thesis[3] was a reconstruction of the Padanian language underlying the modern Gallo-Italian, Venetian and Ladin dialects. Before graduation he also undertook studies in philosophy and theology at the Aquinas Academy, Sydney.
In his academic career Hull taught in the areas of linguistics and modern and classical European languages at Sydney University, Melbourne University, the University of Wollongong and other Australian tertiary institutions. He is a professional lexicographer and a translator working in over a dozen languages. He is currently an adjunct professor at Macquarie University, Sydney.[4]
In the 1990s he assisted the East Timorese leadership in exile by standardizing Tetum and creating a range of linguistic and literary resources for this and other languages of East Timor, then under Indonesian occupation.[5][6][7][8] He was also a member of a human rights delegation organized by the Australian Catholic Social Justice Council which visited the country in 1997 amid escalating violence and reported to the United Nations, the Indonesian Human Rights Commission, the Australian government and the Vatican. In September 1999 he testified before the Australian Senate Inquiry on East Timor on abuses he had witnessed in that country during past visits.[9][10] From 2001 to 2007 he was research and publications director of the Instituto Nacional de Linguística, the national language authority of the independent state of Timor-Leste. He was the designer, principal author and editor of the national Tetum dictionary[11] and was founder and co-editor of the academic journal Estudos de Línguas e Culturas de Timor-Leste.[12]
On 22 May 2012, Hull was awarded the honour of Comendador da Ordem do Infante Dom Henrique (Knight Commander of the Order of Prince Henry) by the President of Portugal, Aníbal Cavaco Silva, for services to the Portuguese language.[13]
Outside the field of linguistics Hull is known for writings on religious questions, most notably the historical causes and socio-cultural impact of church reforms of the 1960s on the Latin Catholic and Eastern Catholic traditions.[14]
