Christopher Stevens
Associate Professor Emeritus
Phone: 310-206-4948
Office: Royce Hall, Room 334B
Christopher Stevens is primarily interested in language variation and language change. How he came to these interests is a long story but his training with excellent linguists at the universities of Michigan, Mainz, and Tübingen had a lot to do with it. Professor Stevens has studied modern German, Dutch, French and several other spoken languages but the dead (or ‘philological’) languages are his forte. His specialty is the older stages of Germanic, specifically, Old High German, Old Saxon, Gothic, Old English, Old Frisian, Old Dutch, Old Norse, including the entire history of German. He studies these languages to gain insights into language variation and change. As a side benefit, much can also be gleaned about the history and culture of the people who used these languages and that, too, fascinates him. In addition to his faculty position in the Program of Indo-European Studies, Prof. Stevens is also a faculty member in the Department of Germanic Languages at UCLA.