Henriette Saada was born in Tunisia to a French mother and an Italian father. She learned to handle multiple languages at an early age: at home she spoke Italian, at school she spoke French, and in the streets she heard Arabic and Maltese spoken. A sufferer of serious myopia, she responded by training her hearing. She is quoted as saying: "As a little girl, I liked the idea that an object could have multiple names, that emotions could be expressed in different ways." She was able to convince her parents to let her go to study English at the Sorbonne, where she performed brilliantly in the International Phonetic Association examination.[3]
She married Gérard Walter, who worked with her on multiple publications and with whom she had two children, Isabelle and Éric.[4]
A decisive event in her life was meeting the linguist André Martinet. She became his closest collaborator and organized a workshop at the École pratique des hautes études from 1966 onwards.[3]
Walter, Henriette. 1976. La dynamique des phonèmes dans le lexique français contemporain (Phonemic dynamics in the contemporary French lexicon). Paris: France Expansion.
Walter, Henriette. 1977. La phonologie du français (The phonology of French). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Walter, Henriette. 1983. La nasale vélaire /ŋ/: un phonème du français? (The velar nasal /ŋ/: a French phoneme?) Langue Française 60, 14–29.
Walter, Henriette. 1988. Le Français dans tous les sens. Paris: Laffont. Translated as French Inside Out by Peter Fawcett, 1994. London: Routledge. ISBN9781134902057
Walter, Henriette. 1994. L'aventure des langues en Occident: Leur origine, leur histoire, leur géographie (The adventure of the languages of the west: origins, history, geography). Paris: Laffont. ISBN9782221059180
Walter, Henriette. 1997. L'aventure des mots français venus d'ailleurs (The adventure of French words with foreign origins). Paris: Laffont. ISBN9782221140505
Walter, Henriette. 1998. Le Français d'ici, de là, de là-bas (French here, there and everywhere). Paris: Laffès. ISBN9782709616508
Walter, Henriette. 2001. Honni soit qui mal y pense: L'incroyable histoire d'amour entre le français et l’anglais (The incredible love story of French and English). Paris: Laffont. ISBN9782221081655
Walter, Henriette, Avenas, Pierre. 2007. La mystérieuse histoire du nom des oiseaux. (The mysterious history of bird names.). Paris: Laffont. ISBN9782221108352
Walter, Henriette. 2020. Les Petits plats dans les grands: La savoureuse histoire des mots de la cuisine et de la table. Paris: Laffont ISBN9782221221419