Which language has the most tones?
The language most often credited with the most tones is Wobé, a Kru language of Côte d'Ivoire, said to have fourteen — but that count has never been confirmed, and many linguists think some of those "tones" are sequences of other tones. The most complex tone systems that are well described are in West Africa and the Americas, not East Asia: around ten tones in Guere, Dan and Mano, and eight to twelve in Ticuna in the Amazon. Mandarin, the tonal language most people know, has four. This post sets out the counts, what is being counted, and why the numbers disagree.
The short answer
No reliable source names a single winner, and the reason is not a lack of research. It is that "how many tones" has no single answer even for a well-studied language: Cantonese has nine tones by one count and six by another, Vietnamese six or eight, Hmong seven or eight, Kam fifteen or nine. The record depends on which method you choose, so the honest answer is a short list:
| Language | Where | Tones | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wobé (Wee) | Côte d'Ivoire | 14, claimed | Not confirmed; some may be sequences of tones |
| Kam (Dong) | southern China | 15 by tradition | 9 on open syllables; the other 6 are on syllables ending in a stop |
| Ticuna | the Amazon: Brazil, Colombia, Peru | 8 to 12, by dialect | "Perhaps the most tonal language of the Americas" |
| Dan (Yacouba) | Côte d'Ivoire, Liberia | 9 to 11, by dialect | Four or five of them level tones |
| Guere (Wè) | Côte d'Ivoire | 10 | — |
| Yaitepec Chatino | Oaxaca, Mexico | 10 | Four level, two rising, three falling, and one limited |
| Usila Chinantec | Oaxaca, Mexico | 9 | Five pitch levels and four contours |
| Mano | Liberia, Guinea | 9 | — |
| Cantonese | Guangdong, Hong Kong | 9 by tradition, 6 | Three of the nine are checked syllables |
| Hmong | China, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand | 7 or 8 | Seven in White and Green Hmong |
| Vietnamese | Vietnam | 6 (older analyses 8) | — |
| Thai | Thailand | 5 | — |
| Shanghainese | Shanghai | 5 in isolation | In a word, the first syllable sets the melody of the rest |
| Mandarin | most of China | 4, plus a neutral tone | — |
Every figure is from the sources at the end of this post, mostly Wikipedia's articles on each language and the World Atlas of Language Structures, and each one is as those sources give it.
What counts as a tone
A tone is a pitch pattern that changes what a word means. In Mandarin, mā (mother) and mǎ (horse) are the same syllable with different tones, and they are different words. There are two ways a language can build a set of them.
Register tones are level pitches, distinguished by height alone: high, mid, low. Many Bantu languages work this way, with tones "distinguished by their pitch level relative to each other", in Wikipedia's words. Contour tones are distinguished by their shape — rising, falling, dipping — which is how Mandarin's four work. Most tonal languages mix the two: Cantonese has level tones and rising and falling ones.
The ceiling on level tones is low. Wikipedia's article on tone says languages "may distinguish up to five levels of pitch", with the Chori language of Nigeria described as distinguishing six surface registers. Usila Chinantec, in Mexico, has five levels plus four contours. In principle five levels could combine into 125 three-point contours; the most any language actually uses, the same article notes, is about a tenth of that.
Why the counts disagree
The checked-syllable problem
The biggest source of inflated numbers is a Chinese tradition. Syllables that end in a stop consonant — p, t, k or a catch in the throat — were classed as a separate "entering tone" (入声), and counted alongside the real pitch categories. They are a syllable shape, not a pitch.
That is where Cantonese's famous nine comes from: six pitch contours, plus three that only occur on checked syllables. Kam does the same on a larger scale — "open syllables can occur in one of nine different tones, checked syllables in six", so the traditional approach counts fifteen. Counted by pitch alone, Kam has nine, and still sits near the top of any list. The Chinese side of this story, including a Guangxi variety widely said to have ten tones that actually has six, is in which Chinese language has the most tones.
Tones or sequences of tones?
The fourteen of Wobé is the other kind of dispute. The claim comes from a 1980 analysis by Bearth and Link, "The tone puzzle of Wobe"; other researchers have not confirmed it, and Wikipedia records that "many of them believe that some of these will turn out to be sequences of tones or prosodic effects". The languages around it, it adds, "do have extraordinarily large tone systems" all the same. Wikipedia's article on tone is careful in the same way about the record-holders as a group: preliminary work on Wobé, Ticuna and the Chatino languages "suggests that some dialects may distinguish as many as fourteen tones or more".
Experts disagree about well-known languages too
The World Atlas of Language Structures gives the sharpest example. Ket, in Siberia, "is described as having none, two, four or eight tones by different authors". If specialists cannot agree on whether a language has any tones at all, a league table to the last tone is not going to be reliable.
How many languages are tonal?
The World Atlas of Language Structures sorts 526 languages into three groups:
- No tones: 306 languages, 58.2%.
- A simple tone system — essentially a two-way contrast, usually high against low: 132 languages, 25.1%.
- A complex tone system, with more contrasts than that: 88 languages, 16.7%.
The chapter's author, Ian Maddieson, warns that this "probably underrepresents the proportion of the world's languages which are tonal", because the sample is not proportional to where languages are. Complex systems "dominate in an area of East and Southeast Asia", and "virtually all the languages in Africa are tonal", with complex systems not unusual, "especially in West Africa".
Where Mandarin and Shanghainese sit
With four tones and a neutral tone, Mandarin falls in the complex group by that definition, and Wikipedia notes that standard Mandarin "has fewer tones" than other varieties of Chinese. Four is not many by the standards of this list, but Mandarin uses them on every syllable and they are the main thing an English speaker has to learn from scratch. The tones, the three rules that change them, and all twenty tone pairs are in the Mandarin tones explained.
Shanghainese is the interesting case. It has five tones on a syllable said alone — more than Mandarin — but in a word of two or more syllables the first syllable's tone spreads across the rest, and the others lose theirs. Wikipedia's tone article calls it "only marginally tonal". The mechanism is on the Shanghainese tones and tone sandhi page; Cantonese's six against Mandarin's four are compared in Mandarin vs Cantonese.
Does the number matter to a learner?
Less than it looks. A language with five or six tones arranged as well-separated shapes can be easier to hear than one with fewer tones crowded into a narrow range, and a language whose tones mostly disappear inside words — Shanghainese — asks something quite different from one that marks every syllable. What a learner of a tonal language actually needs is a clear picture of each tone's shape and a lot of listening to whole words. For Mandarin, the Mandarin course plays every word aloud from the first lesson, and the Mandarin word list and vocabulary test are free.
Sources
- Maddieson, I. (2013). Tone. In Dryer, M. S. & Haspelmath, M. (eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online, chapter 13. wals.info
- Wikipedia: Tone (linguistics) — register and contour tones, five levels, Chori, the "fourteen tones or more", Guere, Dan and Mano, Shanghainese "only marginally tonal". en.wikipedia.org)
- Wikipedia: Wobé language — the fourteen-tone claim (Bearth & Link 1980) and its critics. en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia: Kam language — nine tones on open syllables, six on checked, fifteen by tradition. en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia: Ticuna language — 8–12 phonemic tones by dialect. en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia: Dan language; Guere language; Mano language. Dan, Guere, Mano
- Wikipedia: Eastern Chatino languages — ten tones for Yaitepec Chatino (Rasch 2002). en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia: Usila Chinantec — five register tones and four contour tones. en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia: Cantonese phonology; Hmong language; Vietnamese language; Thai language; Standard Chinese; Shanghainese. Cantonese, Hmong, Vietnamese, Thai, Standard Chinese, Shanghainese