Geoffrey Allan Khan FBA (born 1 February 1958) is a British linguist and philologist of Semitic languages.
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.
He went to a "rough" comprehensive school where he suffered from racial abuse, and "took refuge in learning languages".
[5][6] In 1984, he gained his Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies with a thesis entitled Extraposition and Pronominal Agreement in Semitic Languages.