 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).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 was a reconstruction of the Padanian language underlying the modern Gallo-Italian, Venetian and Ladin dialects.