Geoffrey Allan Khan FBA (born 1 February 1958) is a British linguist and philologist of Semitic languages. He has held the post of Regius Professor of Hebrew at the University of Cambridge since 2012. Considered one of the world's leading experts on Aramaic, he has published grammars for numerous Aramaic dialects and he leads the North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic Database .. His other research has included Biblical Hebrew and medieval Arabic documents.
Biography Khan was born and raised in Middlesbrough in North Yorkshire. His mother was English whereas his father was South Asian of Iranian descent. His paternal grandfather was an Ismaili Muslim who married a Catholic, and Geoffrey's father went to a Jesuit school in Bombay. One of his paternal great-grandmothers was the daughter of a Welsh Wesleyan missionary, and Khan also has Native American ancestry. His parents separated when he was quite young, and he was raised by his mother and grandmother. He went to a "rough" comprehensive school where he suffered from racial abuse, and "took refuge in learning languages".
In 1984, he gained his PhD degree from the School of Oriental and African Studies with a thesis titled Extraposition and Pronominal Agreement in Semitic Languages. He became a researcher at the Cambridge University Library (1983–1993), working on the Cairo Genizah manuscripts. He then joined the University of Cambridge's Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies in 1993. In 2002, he was appointed Professor of Semitic Philology at Cambridge.
His main area of research is in linguistics studies of Hebrew and Aramaic while the focus of his Aramaic research is on North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects.
He served as the chief editor of the Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics, which was published by Brill in 2013.
Honours Fellow of the British Academy, 1998 Honorary Fellow of the Academy of the Hebrew Language, 2011 Lidzbarski Gold Medal for Semitic philology, 2004 Fellow of Academia Europaea, 2014 Honorary Member of the American Oriental Society, 2015 Honorary doctorate, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2017 Honorary doctorate, University of Uppsala, 2018
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