André-Georges Haudricourt (1911 - 1996) was a French botanist, anthropologist and linguist.
A.-G. Haudricourt spent his childhood in Picardie. He obtained his baccalauréat in 1928 and a diploma from the Institut national agronomique (The National Institute of Agriculture) in 1931. He studied Genetics in Paris (1932) and Leningrad (1934-1935). In 1940, he was employed by the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, working at the Department of Botany. He switched to the Department of Linguistics in 1945. His studies was first focused on the Romance languages. Soon he became interested in the Asian languages. He went abroad to Hanoi, working at the library of the École française d'Extrême-Orient from 1948 to 1949.
Haudricourt made contributions to the study of Historical Chinese phonology with his pioneering articles, including L'origine des tons en vietnamien, published in Journal Asiatique in 1954. The article explains tonogenesis in Vietnamese and numerous other East and Southeast Asian languages. It was followed in 1961 by a more comprehensive account of the development and evolution of tonal systems.
Further developments in the study of Old Chinese, Vietnamese and other East Asian languages are based on the seminal insights of A.-G. Haudricourt, who clarified how a toneless language can become tonal, paving the way for the reconstruction of non-tonal ancestors to the languages of Mainland Southeast Asia, such as Proto-Sino-Tibetan and Proto-Tai.
Haudricourt has also made significant contributions to Tai-Kadai historical phonology.