The existing Cantonese-speaking natives (, "bendi") of these areas, known in Cantonese as "Punti", were protective of their own more fertile lands, and the newcomers were pushed to the outer fringes of fertile plains, despite having migrated legitimately, or they settled in more mountainous regions to eke out a living. Conflict between the two groups grew and it is thought that "Hakka" became a term of derision used by the "Punti" aimed at the newcomers. Eventually, the tension between the two groups (the Hakkas had by then been settled for several hundred years and could not be regarded as migrants in any sense) would lead to a series of 19th-century skirmishes in the Pearl River Delta known as the Punti–Hakka Clan Wars. The problem was not that the two groups spoke a different tongue. In fact, the "locals" comprised different peoples speaking several mutually unintelligible tongues, as was typical of the Chinese countryside all over southern China, but they would regard each other as "locals" or Puntis, but exclude the Hakkas from such designation. (The Chinese "bendi" describes any native people in any location; the English term "Punti" describes the native Cantonese in Guangdong but not the emigrant Cantonese elsewhere.)