The Cantonese dialects, as a group,  preserve the Middle Chinese (MC) tonal structure well. The four MC tones were split into Yin and Yang parts. The splits were based on syllable initials: syllables with voiced initials became Yang, and unvoiced Yin. Cantonese and Taishanese Yin Ru syllables further split to Upper and Lower. The Cantonese Yin Ru split is along long/short or lax/tense vowel lines. For example 七 /cat7/ is short or tense, thus the tone is Upper Yin Ru (上阴入), while 刷/caat8/ is long or lax, thus belongs to the Lower Yin Ru (下阴入). Taishanese Yin Ru syllables do not have the long/short or lax/tense vowel distinction but still follow the Cantonese division.

Note that the tonal profiles of the dialects can be different even if the syllables belong to the same tonal group. For example, Taishanese Yang Qu syllables have tone contour 32, but the Cantonese of the same tonal group have 22 instead. Also note that Taishanese Yin Qu has merged into Yin Ping as they both share the same 33 tone contour.

Some Taishanese Ru syllables have the 21 tone contour. The tone is not included in the table because its evolution is of a different nature -- as a result of  morphologically conditioned tone-change (变音). They are colloquial in nature and are few in number.

If we use the phonemic analysis classification, then Taishanese has only five tones: 55, 33, 22, 32, and 21.