Laurent Sagart (French: [saɡaʁ]; born 1951) is a senior researcher at the Centre de recherches linguistiques sur l'Asie orientale (CRLAO – UMR 8563) unit of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).
[4] His early work focused on Chinese dialectology.
[5] His recent work, in collaboration with William H. Baxter, is a reconstruction of Old Chinese that builds on earlier scholarship and in addition takes into account paleography, phonological distinctions in conservative Chinese dialects (Min, Hakka, and Waxiang) as well as the early layers of Chinese loanwords to Vietic, Hmong-Mien and to a lesser extent, Kra-Dai.
He co-authored a proposal that the ability to digest milk played an important role in the Indo-European expansion (Garnier et al. 2017), and took part in a controversy in French academia concerning Indo-European studies (Pellard et al. 2018).
Along with numerous researchers such as Valentin Thouzeau, Robin J. Ryder, Simon J. Greenhill, Johann-Mattis List, Guillaume Jacques and Yunfan Lai, Sagart conclude in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America that the Sino-Tibetan languages originated among millet farmers, located in Northern China, around 7,200 years ago.