Xavier Delamarre

Xavier Delamarre
Born	(1954-06-05) 5 June 1954
Occupation	Linguist, lexicographer
Academic background
Education	IEP Paris (1977), INALCO (1978)
Academic work
Discipline	Celtic linguistics
Sub discipline	Etymology, onomastics, toponymy, lexicography
Institutions	CNRS
Notable works	Dictionnaire de la langue gauloise (2001)

Xavier Delamarre (French pronunciation: ​[ɡzavje dəlamaʁ]; born 5 June 1954) is a French linguist, lexicographer and diplomat. He is regarded as one of the world's foremost authorities on the Gaulish language.

Since 2019, he has been an associate researcher for the CNRS-PSL AOrOc laboratory (Archéologie & Philologie d'Orient et d'Occident). Along with Pierre-Yves Lambert, he is also the co-administrator of Thesaurus Paleo-Celticus, a CNRS project launched in 2019 and aiming to update and replace Alfred Holder's Alt-celtischer Sprachschatz (1913).

With linguist Romain Garnier, Delamarre is the co-publishing editor of Wékwos, a journal founded in 2014 and devoted to Indo-European comparative linguistics.

Career

Born on 5 June 1954, Xavier Delamarre graduated from Sciences Po in 1977, then studied the Lithuanian language at INALCO. Alongside his research in historical and Celtic linguistics, Delamarre followed a career of diplomat from 1984 to 2014. He worked for the French diplomatic post in Helsinki (1984–86), then in Harare (1989–92), in Vilnius (1992–97), in Osaka (1997–98), and in Ljubljana (1998–2000). He was first counsellor at the French embassy in Helsinki from 2004 to 2006, and a special adviser for international cooperation to the Secretary-General of the French government from 2008 to 2014.

In 2001, he published an influential etymological dictionary of the Gaulish language entitled Dictionnaire de la langue gauloise. A second enlarged edition was published in 2003.