Crisscrossed the Four Counties countryside the past few weeks, I couldn't help but notice the dialect group's regional variations.

Comparing the Taicheng and Kaiping varieties, one could easily pick out the i/e inversion (新年 pronunciation above). I also observed the following vowel shifts (Taicheng/Kaiping):

ɔu/ɔ,  ɔ/u,   ɔu/au,   ǝu/au

Many syllables in the Xinhui variation are quite similar to Cantonese, but the distinct Four Counties tones are retained. I would say a first order approximation of it could be Cantonese syllables with Taishanese tones.

In Taicheng, the vowel [i] has mostly become [ei] unless it is stressed -- in that case, the [i] sound is usually retained. For example, my last name Li (李) are now [lei55] most of the time (instead of [li55]). Locals attribute the cause of the change to the huge influx of people from surrounding areas in the past decades. Some would call  [ei]  the lazy sound (懒音) as it is easier to pronounce than [i]. This type of change happened to Cantonese too. For example, in Hong Kong, which has been integrating continuously large number of non-Cantonese speakers, the initial consonant n has been 'lazied' to l, and the ng initial had been 'lazied away' completely, so much so that both ways of pronunciation are now termed correct in most modern Cantonese dictionaries.

The rapid industrialization of the Cantonese-speaking Pearl River Delta, with large influx of Mandarin and other southern dialects speaking immigrants, will exert ever greater influence over the language of the Four Counties. After all, a trip from Xinhui to Guangzhou (Canton) today is just a 50-minute light rail ride -- almost the exact time it would take to travel from my suburban Plano home to downtown Dallas, also by light rail.