How many tones does Cantonese have?
There should be 6 tones in Cantonese according to my psycholinguistic study.
http://www.patrickchu.net/uploads/9/0/5/3/9053324/2011_plrt_paper.pdf
Please refer to the above article for the detailed experiment.
There is more than one way to count Cantonese tones. There are four traditional categories. Each category is split in Yin and Yang (8 divisions), and Cantonese has an extra split in the fourth category (Yin-Ru), yielding 9 divisions, or tones. But if we count all the contours, there are 10, as there are two realizations of the first tone. However, if we compare the different contours, we will notice that all three divisions in the fourth category (identified as any word with stop endings) each match one of the other contours, so 10 – 3 = 7 different tone contours. Many textbooks will not actually consider the two 1st tone readings, since it has disappeared in some areas, therefore it is common to see citation of 9 tones, but 6 individual contours (many textbooks number the tones 1-6). This is a confusing matter, but it must be kept in mind that any number (6, 7, 9, 10) is correct, it just depends on what you are counting. I have seen claims of as many as 13, but these are clearly misle
