The death of Jeff Siegel on 8 March 2025 of leukaemia has robbed us of one of the world’s leading scholars of language contact in many places and contexts, but also of someone for whom linguistics was first and foremost about people and the way they manage to forge new ways of communicating, however much or little they may have to start with. The therapies Jeff had been receiving from the time of his diagnosis around eight months earlier had given him time to travel, to catch up with far-flung family and friends, and to bring his magnificent dictionary of Nama to fruition (more on this below) so that it could be launched in the PNG village where it is spoken. Right up to a short time before his death he was looking into new software solutions that would make this work more accessible to speakers. Calm and philosophical about a death that came much earlier than those who knew his extraordinary vigour had expected, he died peacefully at home.
Born in Chicago in 3 November 1945, Jeff grew up there before going to Cornell where he completed a BA in 1967. Jeff followed a path parallel to many Americans of his era whose formative experiences overseas would lead them into linguistics, volunteering for the US Peace Corps, who placed him with an Indian community in Fiji. As was standard in the Peace Corps at the time, he received solid language training beforehand, learning Hindi in Hawai’i. But the standard Hindi he was taught there differed significantly from the Fiji Hindi (or ‘Pidgin Hindustani’) actually spoken by the Indian community people in Fiji. Nonetheless, his Fiji Hindi friends told him he should speak standard Hindi, superior as it was perceived as being to their own actual language: even if people didn’t understand him, the rationale went, at least they would admire the way they spoke. Always one to forge his own path, especially when it deepened his contacts with those around him, Jeff went about learning Fiji Hindi anyway. All up he spent three years in Fiji, two with the Peace Corps then one as a regular teacher at Nandi High School. But he was equally interested in Hindi in its Indian context, and spent over a year studying standard Hindi in Delhi, and then tabla with a guru.
The creative tension he had gradually become aware of, between these two very different types of Hindi and the very different cultural settings of Hindi speakers in India and in Fiji, led him back into further linguistic study. He undertook a Master’s at the University of Hawai’i (1973), then took up a job teaching at UNITECH, the Papua New Guinea university of technology in Lae. This gave him a chance to immerse himself in the rich and rapidly-changing world of another contact language, Tok Pisin. Ever the intrepid traveller, he hiked around many parts of PNG. This led among other things to a fascinating monograph on traditional methods of bridge construction in that country – a revealing choice reminiscent of Jim Matisoff’s dictum that ‘language is the frail bridge that we fling across the chasm of the inexpressible and the incommunicable’. Whether they are pidgins (forms of a language that have been stripped down to enable their rapid learning for interethnic communication), the creoles that they can give rise to as prolonged use leads to the development of more complex structures, or koines that reproduce the same dynamic but now between related dialects, contact languages fashion new bridges between people previously unable to communicate because of the lack of any shared language.
He then returned to further study, obtaining his PhD in 1985 from the Australian National University, which is where I first met him – in a yoga class. His PhD traced the history of language contact on plantations in Fiji through its formative period from 1865, as speakers of many language varieties from the Gangetic plain were brought to Fiji as indentured labourers, gradually evolving a koiné from the crucible of this mosaic of Hindi varieties as well as the need to communicate with many other ethnic groups. This finely textured work, merging history, philology and contact linguistics, went on to be published by Cambridge University Press in 1987 as Language Contact in a Plantation Environment: A Sociolinguistic History of Fiji.
Jeff was then recruited to teach at the Port Vila campus of the University of the South Pacific, exposing him to another vibrant Pacific creole, Bislama. While there, his colleague Terry Crowley introduced him to another linguist, Diana Eades, a specialist in Aboriginal English and forensic applications of linguistics, who went on to become his wife and is also a member of this Academy. From there he was recruited, in 1987, to the newly-established Department of Linguistics at the University of New England, where he was to work until his (formal) retirement in 2005, though with periods at the University of Hawai’i where he founded and for two years directed the Charlene Sato Centre of Pidgin, Creole and Dialect Studies.
Throughout this period he continued to advance the study of the far-flung family of Pacific contact languages, from Fiji Hindi through Tok Pisin and Bislama to Hawaii Pidgin. Along the way he added a pedagogical grammar of Hawaii Pidgin (with Kent Sakoda, 2003) to his earlier publication Say it in Fiji Hindi (1977). He was also involved in a range of initiatives to extend recognition of these varieties and help overcome the many problems of equity and access faced by their speakers. National educational systems were all too inclined to regard these varieties as backward, broken obstacles to the learning of standards, rather than fascinating products of the human urge to fashion new and intricate tools for communicating across the barriers of dislocation, often forced by inhumane transplantation at the hands of colonisation. An example is his Vernacular Education in the South Pacific, prepared for the Australian Agency for International Development.
Meanwhile contact linguistics, especially of pidgins, creoles and koines, was moving from a disdained periphery – and the absence of creolists in the Academy before Jeff’s election is symptomatic – to the hot centre of linguistic theorising. There are several reasons for this. One is its unparallelled potential to reveal the processes by which humans build new linguistic structures, a second is its ability to help us understand the primordial processes of language evolution, and a third is the way it can shed light on the interaction between social and linguistic factors as the massive disruptions of colonial expansion shook the traditions of many groups and led to the formation of new identities and new communicative modes within them. At the time the field was dominated by the ‘bioprogram hypothesis’ developed by influential creolist Derek Bickerton, who was also based at Hawai’i during Jeff’s earlier time there, in his influential book Roots of Language. For Bickerton, the emergence of creoles – which like many others he believed owed their emerging complexity to child learners exposed to the pidgins used by their parents – offered an unparallelled insight into how innate biases of a putative ‘universal grammar’ shared by all humans and serving them as an initial set of hypotheses as they learned the language around them. Creoles, for Bickerton, allowed us to see what these innate biases were, by abstracting away from the clutter of inherited conventions that complicate the acquisition of languages with a longer-established tradition.
Jeff’s work ran directly against this emerging orthodoxy. For him it was not children who were shaping how creoles (and koinés) developed, but adult learners. These adults, already possessing their own rich linguistic systems, shaped how creoles and koinés developed, through the twin processes of simplification (of the target language) and of transfer (mapping meaning-features of their mother tongue(s) onto whatever parts of the target language seem promising bearers of this load). This view makes much more sense of how well-grounded the creoles of Pacific (e.g. Tok Pisin and Bislama) and Australia (e.g. Kriol, Yumplatok) are in the traditional languages of these areas. Like the vast majority of traditional languages, these creoles all have rich pronoun systems including a dual number (for example tupala, tupela etc for ‘they two’, derived by mapping the preexisting category of third person dual onto the English words two and feller), and an inclusive vs exclusive distinction in the we-pronouns (e.g. yu(n)mi, from you(and)me, vs mindubala from me two feller). Australian creoles have even developed a ‘kinship dyad’ suffix for reciprocal kin pairs (e.g. grenigija ‘grandparent and grandchild, grandkin dyad’ from granny + together) displaying the transfer of a meaning-to-grammar mapping common in traditional Australian languages but as alien to English as it is to Bickerton’s bioprogram. Jeff developed this alternative view, so much richer in terms of culture history and the agency of the relevant speech communities, in his masterful 2008 book The Emergence of Pidgin and Creole Languages, published with Oxford University Press. This work, his subsequent Second Dialect Acquisition with Cambridge University Press (2010) and many other articles and chapters established him as one of the world’s leading specialists in pidgins, creoles and koinés. Within Australia, he played a key role in bringing the study of contact varieties to a central focus in the discipline of linguistics.
Around this time Jeff branched out on an entirely new research venture. In 1992 Jeff’s son Ben had come to live with Jeff and Diana’s family, having spent his first nine years in his mother’s village and the surrounding district, where he grew up speaking the Nama language (as well as English after starting school). At that point, the Nama language was virtually undescribed (by linguists). I was just beginning to work on a related language, Nen, and got talking to Jeff about the possibility of us putting together a joint project on the languages of the Morehead Region of Western Province, PNG. Jeff was enthusiastic, and his interest in finding out more about his son’s language led to him participating in an ARC project, with myself, Wayan Arka and a talented bunch of PhD students including Mae Carroll and Christian Doehler, on the rich linguistic tapestry of Southern New Guinea. Ben’s mother Yoshie Dawi, who was a teacher and later principal, was one of the main consultants on Jeff’s Nama research.
This work was to culminate in the publication of his 2023 A Grammar of Nama: A Language of Southern New Guinea, which reveals the intricate workings of this language with great insight and sensitivity. He also produced a dictionary of Nama, published non-commercially to facilitate its economic availability to community members. Though he was by then too ill to travel to the village for the launch, his son Ben and daughter-in-law Brooke were able to visit the adjoining village of Mata and local hub of Morehead for a paired set of events: a memorial for Jeff, and the launch of the Nama dictionary. Ben and Brook had taken up fifteen copies, then individually wrapped by his mother Yoshie and her brother Murrie to give to the main people who worked with Jeff. They were surrounded by flowers, there was singing and speeches, and nearby stood the grave of Tony Emoia, Jeff’s close friend and language teacher, and a driving force behind the tremendous community project that produced this dictionary, so far-reaching in its documentation of the Nama linguistic tradition.
Jeff possessed a remarkable ability to advance a highly original research program at a prodigious pace without for a moment losing his sense of calm, mischief and joie de vivre, and to combine rigorous and penetrating linguistic work with an abiding commitment to give back to the communities he worked with, or who were to be found around him. Since 2003 he was a member of Armidale Sanctuary Humanitarian Settlement, including being president of the organisation from 2020-2024. In that capacity he was heavily involved with helping the settlement in Armidale of over 800 Ezidis (Yazidis), who had managed to escape from the ISIS genocide in 2014; a further 200 have arrived since Jeff died. One big issue for the Ezidis is that the Australian government policy categorised them as speaking Kurdish Kurmanji, meaning that officially-sanctioned interpreters were available only in that language. This led to various communication difficulties, with serious consequences for some in the health area. Jeff worked with a local Ezidi community leader, Salam Qaro, to write a submission to NAATI making the case that the Ezidi language is significantly different from Kurmanji; unfortunately neither NAATI nor the international body that certifies the existence of distinct languages accepted the argument.
Jeff is survived by his wife Diana Eades, his son and daughter-in-law Ben and Brooke, his (step)daughters and sons-in-law Ruth and Falk, and Jenny and Paul, and his grandchildren Quincy and Nalu, Leo and Bruno, and Daniel and Michael.
I thank Diana Eades for carefully checking a number of details of Jeff’s life, and Falk Schreiber for agreeing to use the photograph he took. I also thank Felicity Meakins and Cindy Schneider for sending me their own very informative obituary of Jeff, which appeared in the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages (2025), from which I have borrowed the characterisation of Jeff’s first experiences with Fiji Hindi.
Distinguished Professor Nick Evans FAHA FBA
The Australian National University
