[2][3] Born on 5 June 1954,[4] Xavier Delamarre graduated from Sciences Po in 1977, then studied the Lithuanian language at INALCO.
[2] In 2001, Delamarre published an influential etymological dictionary of the Gaulish language entitled Dictionnaire de la langue gauloise.
He worked for the French diplomatic post in Helsinki (1984–86), then in Harare (1989–92), Vilnius (1992–97), Osaka (1997–98), and Ljubljana (1998–2000).
[2] Since 2019, Delamarre 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).