The Southern Athabaskan languages are "verb-heavy" — they have a great ponderance of verbs but relatively few nouns. In addition to verbs and nouns, these languages have other elements such as pronouns, clitics of various functions, demonstratives, numerals, adverbs, and conjunctions, among others. Harry Hoijer grouped most of the above into a word class which he called "particle" based on the type of inflection that occurs on the word class. This categorization provides three main lexical categories (i.e. parts of speech):