William Allen Smalley (April 4, 1923December 16, 1997) was an American linguist. He is best known for his role in the development of the Romanized Popular Alphabet for the Hmong language. Life Early life William A. Smalley was born in 1923 in Jerusalem, where his parents worked as missionaries of the Christian and Missionary Alliance. He and his family remained there until 1934, at which time they returned to the United States. In 1941, he matriculated in Houghton College, where he developed an interest in anthropology, which he saw as relevant to missionary work. After graduating from Houghton in 1945 with a degree in English literature, he attended the Missionary Training Institute (1945–46) and received linguistic training in Bible translation at the Summer Institute of Linguistics at the University of Oklahoma (1946, 1947). In 1946, he also enrolled in Columbia University's graduate program in anthropology with an emphasis on linguistics. Vietnam and Laos In 1950, the Christian and Missionary Alliance sent him to the southern region of Vietnam, where he worked on problems of language analysis. The following year, he was sent to Luang Prabang in Laos in order to analyse Khmu and prepare lessons in the language for other missionaries. In Laos, he met Reverend G. Linwood Barney and Father Yves Bertrais, and together they began working on a writing system for the Hmong language, which had until then been unwritten. The system they developed became known as the Romanized Popular Alphabet, and it is today the most widely used Hmong writing system. Yang Dao, the assistant director of the English Language Learner Project of the St. Paul Public Schools, has said: "I cannot value his work. … It is invaluable. This writing system helped us to preserve our culture and tradition and history. Now it is used by Hmong all over the world." In 1954, the outbreak of the Laotian Civil War forced him and his wife to return to the United States. There he completed his dissertation on the Khmu language, for which he was awarded a doctorate by Columbia in 1956. (In 1961, an abbreviated version of his dissertation was published by the American Oriental Society.) United Bible Societies From 1954 onwards, he worked primarily in Southeast Asia as a translation consultant and coordinator for the American Bible Society and its parent organization, United Bible Societies. The nature of his work meant that he twice took