Southern Athabascan (also Apachean, Southern Athabaskan) is a subfamily of Athabaskan languages spoken in the North American Southwest. Refer to Southern Athabascan languages for the main article. Typological overview Typologically, Southern Athabaskan languages are mostly fusional, polysynthetic, nominative–accusative head-marking languages. These languages are argued to be non-configurational languages. The canonical word order is SOV, as can be seen in Lipan example below: Kónitsąąhį́į́ dziłádałts’aa’híí áí daajiłdiił "The Lipan ate those wild grapes." Subject = Kónitsąąhį́į́ "the Lipan" Object = dziłádałts’aa’híí áí "those wild grapes" (dziłádałts’aa’híí "wild grapes", áí "those") Verb = daajiłdiił "they ate them" Southern Athabaskan words are modified primarily by prefixes, which is uncommon for SOV languages (suffixes are expected). 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): verbs nouns/postpositions particles There is nothing that corresponds to what are called adjectives in English. Adjectival notions are provided by verbs; however, these adjectival verb stems do form a distinct sub-class of verb stems which co-occur with adjectival prefixes. Nouns SA nouns are essentially of the following types (with various subtypes): simple nouns compound nouns nouns derived from verbs/verb phrases (deverbal noun) The simple nouns can consist of only a noun stem (which are usually only a single syllable long), such as Chiricahua: ku̧u̧ "fire", and Navajo: sǫ’ "star". Other nouns may consist of a noun plus one or more prefixes, such as Navajo: dibé "sheep" (< di- + -bé; stem: -bé) or of a noun plus an enclitic or suffix, such as Chiricahua: dlú̧í "prairie dog" (< dlú̧- + -í; stem: dlú̧-). The added prefixes may be lexical or they may be inflectional prefixes (e.g. personal prefixes indicating possession). SA languages do not have many simple nouns, but these nouns are the most ancient part of the lexicon and thus are essential in making comparisons between Athabascan languages. Another noun type is a noun compound consisting of more than one noun stem, such as Chiricahua: ku̧u̧ba̧a̧ "fireside" (< ku̧u̧ "fire" + ba̧a̧ "edge"), and Navajo: tsésǫ’