Obituary: Jeffrey Alan Siegel, 3 November 1945–8 March 2025

On 8 March 2025, Jeff Siegel lost an eight-month battle with acute myeloid leukaemia. Jeff was a dear friend and colleague for many of us, and a valued member of the broader Creolist community. At the time of his passing, Jeff was a Professor Emeritus in Linguistics at the University of New England (Australia), a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages. He was the first to describe three Pacific contact languages — Pidgin Hindustani, Wai (a mixture of Malaitan dialects in Fiji) and Nauru Pidgin — and co-authored the only grammar of Hawai‘i Creole (with Kent Sakoda). He was also well known for his empirical work on Tok Pisin, Bislama, Fiji Hindi, New Caledonia Tayo, Chinese Pidgin English and Fiji English; and for his theoretical work on the emergence of Pidgin and Creole languages. Jeff also undertook extensive language documentation work, most recently in southern New Guinea, a language diversity ‘hotspot’ with around 35 languages belonging to nine families. He held an Australian Research Council grant “Languages of Southern New Guinea” with Nick Evans and Wayan Arka to make inroads into the documentation of these largely undescribed languages. His last great contribution to this field was the Grammar of Nama: A Papuan Language of Southern New Guinea (Mouton de Gruyter, 2023). Even in his last days, Jeff was busy making edits to the Nama dictionary and working on a paper reviewing research on constraints governing substrate influence.¹ In this obituary, we pay respect to his work in the field of contact languages.