[12] His grandparents were tenant farmers in Pembrokeshire, South Wales, and they and his father were native speakers of Welsh.

He received his doctor of philosophy degree at the University of Göttingen in 1976,[14] with a dissertation on Perspectives of intonation analysis (1976).

[16] Gibbon started his academic career in the year 1968 as an English lecturer at the Seminar für Englische Philologie, University of Göttingen, Germany.

As part of these projects he was lead editor of two handbooks on standards and evaluation of speech technology systems (1997, 2000).

[25] He has researched English, German, Welsh, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Yacouba, and Baule (Ivory Coast), Tem (Togo), Igbo, and Ibibio (Nigeria), Kuki-Thadou (India) and Mandarin (China),[1][26][27] and is particularly concerned about endangered languages.