So, you’re traveling or moving to Holland. Or are you? It can be a bit confusing, how the country seems to be sometimes called Holland, and the Netherlands on other occasions. And then there’s the Dutch language, which kind of sounds like Deutsch, aka German? What exactly is the deal there? Let’s set things straight once and for all.
The Netherlands
Let’s cut right to the chase: our gorgeous, tiny country is called Netherlands (or the Netherlands) in English. It’s one of the four countries within the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the others being three Caribbean islands: Curaçao, Aruba, and Sint Maarten (which is about half of the island that has the same name, called Saint Martin in English). I’ll forget about those islands for simplicity, but they’re a very official part of the Kingdom, although they do have their own governments, and Dutch is only one of the official languages there.
The nether part in Netherlands means lower, which isn’t all that hard to fathom when you realize that about a quarter of the country sits below sea level, and the highest mountain rises a whopping 322 meters above it. If that isn’t nether, I don’t know what is. The the part is just an addition that isn’t in the official name, but since Netherlands is plural, you do need it when you talk about the country, just like, for example, the Bahamas. Lands obviously just means lands, as in: slabs of land.
In Dutch, the Netherlands is called Nederland, which means exactly the same as it does in English – only we use the singular form, which means we don’t need to use an article (in the name of the Kingdom, het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden, we do use the plural form, plus the added article. Der means of the). Together with Belgium and Luxembourg, it’s sometimes referred to as De Lage Landen or The Low Lands/Countries, meaning the exact same thing as the Netherlands. Together, they’re sometimes referred to as the Benelux, which is nothing more than a combination of the first two or three letters of Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg.
Holland
Holland is a name you may have heard a lot, and you may even use it yourself much more often than you use the Netherlands, something even Dutchies will often do. This makes some sense in historic perspective, but it is technically quite wrong.
The Netherlands currently consists of twelve provinces, two of which are named Noord-Holland (North Holland) and Zuid-Holland (South Holland). Together, they form an unofficial duo that can in fact be called Holland, although it holds no official status as such.
This used to be different, though. Back in the Roman era, Holland, roughly consisting of what is now North and South Holland combined, was a county within the Roman Empire. The name was also given by the Romans – they called us Hollandi – although that name comes from an Old Dutch word, holtland, meaning woodland. Some think the name derives from hollow land (the Dutch word for hollow is hol), but this is not the case.
…and yes. It actually is pretty much flat.
Holland vs. The Netherlands
Then why do we call the whole country Holland, even though it clearly isn’t called that? One of the reasons is that North and South Holland house the most important parts of the country. Amsterdam, the capital, is in North Holland, even though, funnily enough, it isn’t the province capital – that would be Haarlem, from which the neighborhood in NYC gets its name. Den Haag (or The Hague, if you must) is in South Holland, and houses the seat of government and the main residence of King Willem-Alexander (the other two are also in Den Haag, and Amsterdam). There’s also the port of Rotterdam, which is one of Europe’s most important ports, also situated in South Holland; our biggest airport, Schiphol, sits just south of Amsterdam, in North Holland.
Another, much less official explanation is that the Netherlands is a bit of a long name to pronounce, and Holland just sounds so much easier. It’s hard to know exactly how much this plays a role, but it sure does for me, personally.
What do the Dutch say?
This is a bit of an odd one. A lot of Dutch people will blissfully call their own country Holland when they’re speaking English, even though they won’t do that all too often in Dutch. We obviously know they’re not officially interchangeable, and yet, we just do it anyway, especially in informal situations. Perhaps this has everything to do with the fact that most of the world will recognize Holland more easily than they will the Netherlands.
When we use the word Hollander in Dutch, we often do it to distinguish someone who lives in either North or South Holland from those living in one of the other ten provinces. People from Belgium sometimes use it for any Dutch person out there, although also in a colloquial manner.
There are some older expressions and phrases that do use the word Holland instead:
Hollandse pot (Dutch pot – no, not that, it’s the general name for a set of dishes from the traditional Dutch cuisine)
Hollandse Nieuwe (Dutch herring – nieuwe means new, as in: freshly caught)
Hup, Holland, Hup (A traditional song used to cheer on our national sports teams)
De Vliegende Hollander (The Flying Dutchman)
How about other countries?
The distinction between Holland and the Netherlands exists in a lot of other languages, too. For example, in Spanish, the official name of the country is los Países Bajos (also literally the low countries), but Holanda may also be used colloquially. The Dutch language is officially called neerlandés in Spanish, but holandés is also used – don’t worry, I’ll get to the weird language name in a bit.
While in other European countries such as France and Germany, the word Holland isn’t used a lot, the plural form that English uses, is – die Niederlande in German, and les Pays-Bas in French. They all add the article, too.
Why do we speak Dutch?
Now onto a whole other story. The English name for the official language spoken in the Netherlands, is Dutch. This may remind you of another European language: Deutsch, the German word for German. And that is not a coincidence.
While the Dutch call their own language Nederlands, which makes sense since the country is called Nederland, the Dutch thing doesn’t sound completely mental to us, either. The simplified origin story is that Diets is the name of the collection of languages that used to be spoken in what is now part of the Netherlands and Germany. The word means as much as of the people, and it was simply the combination of languages spoken by common folk, rather than those smarty-pants Latin speakers that were setting up camp all over Europe. More about the origin of the Dutch language here.
While we don’t really use the word Diets anymore, it’s still featured in a different way in the first line of our national anthem:
Wilhelmus van Nassouwe
Ben ik, van Duitsen bloed
This tends to weird Dutchies out a bit, for the word Duits means German in Dutch, but it’s nothing more than our founding father, William of Nassau, stating: I am of common descent, or blood.
Long story short
There’s no other way to put this: the official name of the country you’re currently trying to learn the language of, is [the] Netherlands. Still, Holland is often used as a synonym, even though this is technically incorrect in both historic and current view. The Dutch don’t use the word Holland themselves a lot when speaking Dutch (which just means: language of the common people around these parts), at least not in reference to the whole country, but they will often do so when speaking English – probably because it’s just easier, and the rest of the world will understand us better.
You’re not very likely to find the name Holland on official documents like passports and plane tickets, and there’ll always be pure-hearted Dutchies who hate to be called a Hollander, but in general, it’s fairly safe to use the term when talking to one – although that’s obviously coming from a guy who’s literally from Holland.
