[rawnlq]

I am a native speaker so I don't really care about the number of tones, I was just citing the link. You can speak to me in monotone and I will figure it out from context just like how you can learn to understand someone with a strong accent.

My theory above is that a fixed number of tones is a linguist madeup concept from data that happens to fit the clustering of the tone graphs. The real tone is a distribution on a per word basis that you learn from natural variations from the other speakers around you. Do the 6 or 9 or 4 tones sometimes fit these distributions? Yes, but it's still just an approximation of the real variations that natives use and shouldn't be treated as an authoritative pronunciation.