Concepts of animacy constantly vary beyond a simple animate and inanimate binary; many languages function off of a hierarchical General Animacy Scale that ranks animacy as a "matter of gradience." Typically (with some variation of order and of where the cutoff for animacy occurs), the scale ranks humans above animals, then plants, natural forces, concrete objects, and abstract objects, in that order. In referring to humans, this scale contains a hierarchy of persons, ranking the first and second person pronouns above the third person, partly a product of empathy, involving the speaker and interlocutor.