Which Chinese language has the most tones?

There is a real answer, and it is more interesting than a number: the variety usually credited with the most tones does not have them. Almost every tone count you will read is counting two different things at once.

Updated 22 September 2026 · 4 min read

The counts, as usually given

Two columns, wildly different answers, and neither is wrong. What separates them is what you agree to count.

The checked tone is not a tone

Here is the whole problem in one fact. Chinese tradition counts a checked tone — 入声, the entering tone — as a tone. It is not one, in the sense a Western phonetician means. Wikipedia is blunt: a checked tone “is not a tone in the western phonetic sense but rather a type of syllable that ends in a stop consonant or a glottal stop”.

In other words it is a syllable shape, not a pitch contour. Counting it alongside real pitch categories is like counting “words that end in -s” as a tense. It is a coherent tradition and it inflates every number it touches.

That is exactly where Cantonese’s famous nine comes from. Wikipedia’s Cantonese article says the language “is a tonal language with six phonetic tones”, and explains the older figure: syllables ending in a stop “were considered as ‘checked tones’ and treated separately by diachronic convention, identifying Cantonese with nine tones”, adding that these “are seldom counted as phonemic tones in modern linguistics”. Nine categories, six tones. Both numbers describe the same language.

The variety with the most tones does not have the most tones

If you go looking for a record-holder you arrive at Bobai, a Yue variety in Guangxi. Wikipedia’s article on it is refreshingly direct: Bobai “is widely cited as having the most tones of any variety of Chinese, though in fact it only has six, the same as most Yue dialects”.

The reputation is earned honestly enough. Bobai makes a four-way division in checked syllables where other Yue varieties make a three-way one, so counted by the traditional method it comes out ahead of Cantonese — which is where the figure of ten that circulates comes from. Underneath, it has the same six pitch contrasts as its neighbours.

Shanghainese counts down instead of up

Most varieties look more tonal than they are. Shanghainese looks less. It has five tones you can distinguish on a syllable said alone, and then something unusual happens as soon as you put two syllables together.

Shanghainese tone sandhi is left-prominent: the first syllable of a word sets the melody of the whole word and the others lose their own. So in running speech the number of tonal contrasts actually doing work is far below five. Push the analysis and Wikipedia reports that Shanghainese has “only a two-way phonemic tone contrast, falling vs rising”.

For a learner that is genuinely good news, and it is why this site tells people not to drill tones in Shanghainese the way they would in Mandarin. You learn the shape of a word, not the tone of each syllable in it. The mechanism is on the tone sandhi page.

So what is the honest answer?

• By traditional category count, among the major varieties: Yue at Guangzhou with nine, with Wu at Suzhou, Min at Xiamen, Hakka at Meixian and Jin at Taiyuan all at eight.
• By phonemic pitch contrast, the answer is much flatter: six is about the ceiling for the big varieties, and Cantonese, Hakka and Bobai all sit there.
• By what a listener is actually tracking in connected speech, Shanghainese is at the bottom of the list rather than the middle, for the sandhi reason above.

There is also a real geographical pattern under the noise, and it is worth more than the record: northern varieties tend to have fewer tonal distinctions and southern ones more. Mandarin at four is the northern end; Cantonese and Min at the southern.

And Chinese is not the most tonal family anyway

Worth knowing, because the question is usually asked as though Chinese were the extreme case. It is not. Wikipedia’s article on tone states that “the most complex tonal systems are actually found in Africa and the Americas, not East Asia”, naming Guere, Dan and Mano in Liberia and Ivory Coast with around ten tones, and noting that some varieties of Wobe, Ticuna and Chatino “may distinguish as many as fourteen tones or more”.

Even nearby, the same counting inflation happens on a larger scale: Kam, a Kam-Sui language spoken next door to the Yue area, has nine tones on open syllables and six on checked ones, “so that the traditional approach counts fifteen tones”. Same method, same inflation, bigger number.

What this means if you are learning one

Ask what you are being asked to learn rather than how many there are. Four well-separated Mandarin tones on every syllable is a different task from six Cantonese tones in a crowded pitch space, which is different again from five Shanghainese tones that mostly stop mattering once a word has two syllables.

On raw count Shanghainese sits above Mandarin. On what you actually have to do, it is the easier of the two, which is set out on the difficulty page. A number on a table was never going to tell you that.

Sources

1. Wikipedia: Cantonese — six phonetic tones, and the traditional nine (九声六调)
2. Wikipedia: Bobai dialect — “widely cited as having the most tones of any variety of Chinese, though in fact it only has six”
3. Wikipedia: Checked tone — “not a tone in the western phonetic sense but rather a type of syllable”
4. Wikipedia: Shanghainese — five tones in isolation, left-prominent sandhi, and the two-way phonemic analysis
5. Wikipedia: Wenzhounese — eight phonetic tones, three phonemic
6. Wikipedia: Hokkien — seven or eight tones, five or six phonemic
7. Wikipedia: Hakka Chinese — the varying tone counts by dialect
8. Wikipedia: Varieties of Chinese — the comparative table of tonal categories, and northern varieties having fewer distinctions than southern
9. Wikipedia: Tone (linguistics) — the most complex tone systems are in Africa and the Americas
10. Wikipedia: Kam language — nine tones on open syllables and six on checked, traditionally counted as fifteen