[1][2] From 1941, Smalley attended Houghton College, where he developed an interest in anthropology, which he saw as relevant to missionary work.

[1][2] 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.

[1] 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.

[1] Yang Dao, the assistant director of the English Language Learner Project of the St. Paul Public Schools, has said: "I cannot value his work.

"[3] In 1954, the outbreak of the Laotian Civil War forced him and his wife, Jane, to return to the United States.

[1] He died of a heart attack at the Hospital of Saint Raphael, New Haven, Connecticut, on December 16, 1997, at the age of seventy-four.