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The government has started to rebrand the country as the Netherlands to enhance its image in the face of global competition. For decades, the Dutch government used “Holland” and “the Netherlands” interchangeably to describe the country known for its iconic canals, tulip fields and windmills.
Because tourists primarily visit cities in the region of Holland, largely ignoring the other 10 provinces, the government has decided to work to attract focus on the country as a whole. The Dutch government is transitioning to using “The Netherlands” in all of its official branding.
In Dutch, the country is called Nederland, so this can sometimes get translated as just Netherlands in English. However, according to the Dutch government, the official name of the country is the Netherlands - taken from the Kingdom of the Netherlands, or Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in Dutch.
The Netherlands is informally referred to as Holland in various languages, including Dutch and English. In other languages, Holland is the formal name for the Netherlands. Holland can also refer to a region within the Netherlands that consists of North and South Holland.
In January 2020, the Netherlands officially dropped its support of the word Holland for the whole country, which included a logo redesign that changed "Holland" to "NL".
Seeing as the Dutch refer to themselves as "nederlanders", there's no reason why the English can't use the equivalent 'netherlanders', in the same vein as 'greenlanders' or indeed 'new zealanders', but that's a different question.
The word Dutch comes from a Proto-Germanic word meaning “of the people.” It shares a root with the German word Deutsch, which has led to some confusing names. The name Germans call Germany, for example, is Deutschland and the people there Deutsch. Dutch and German are related, after all, both being Germanic languages.
The Koninkrijk der Nederlanden (Kingdom of the Netherlands) is made up of 4 countries: Aruba, Curaçao, Sint Maarten and the Netherlands. The Netherlands includes 3 public bodies located in the Caribbean region: Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba.
The Netherlands consists of 12 provinces but many people use “Holland” when talking about the Netherlands. The two provinces of Noord- and Zuid-Holland together are Holland. The 12 provinces together are the Netherlands.
The Dutch (Dutch: Nederlanders) are an ethnic group native to the Netherlands. They share a common ancestry and culture and speak the Dutch language.
The Dutch government has officially decided to drop the moniker of Holland going forward, and will only refer to itself as the Netherlands. The Netherlands actually consists of 12 provinces, two of which combined make up Holland, so referring to the Netherlands as a whole as Holland is just wrong.
Confusion continues because: People who live in the Hollands are called Hollanders, but all citizens of the Netherlands are called Dutch as is their language. But in Dutch they say: Nederlands sprekende Nederlanders in Nederland which sounds like they'd rather we call them Netherlanders speaking Netherlandish.
There's only one country in the Netherlands: the Netherlands. Holland is not a country, but a region of the Netherlands that is made up of two provinces where most of the population of the Netherlands lives.
Changing the name costs EUR 200,000 to the country's budget. On 1 January 2020 the name Holland officially ceases to exist as a designation of the Netherlands State.
Dutch East Indies, also called Netherlands East Indies, Dutch Nederlands Oost-Indië or Nederlandsch-Indië, one of the overseas territories of the Netherlands until December 1949, now Indonesia.
Dutch is an official language in Belgium, but it's not spoken throughout the whole country. Dutch is mainly spoken in Flanders (Vlaanderen), the Dutch speaking part of Belgium. The 'Belgian Dutch' is called Flemish (Vlaams).
The southern "Spanish Netherlands" corresponds approximately to modern Belgium and Luxembourg, and the northern "United Provinces" (or "Dutch Republic)", which spoke Dutch and was predominantly Protestant, was the predecessor of the modern Netherlands.
Netherland territories included Indonesia (1602-1945), Sri Lanka (17th century-1802), the Netherlands Antilles (since 1634), Tobago (1654-1678), Suriname (17th century-1975), Guyana (1667-1815), Belgium (1815-1830), Luxembourg (1815-1867), South Africa (1652-1805), parts of Malaysia (1610-1830), and a part of eastern ...
no! You're a Dane if you're from Denmark – and you speak Danish. You're Dutch if you come from The Netherlands, which is also sometimes (wrongly) called Holland. In fact, Holland is just the western region of The Netherlands, encompassing the districts of Noord-Holland and Zuid-Holland.
The etymology of Deutschland is pretty simple. The word deutsch comes from diutisc in Old High German, which means “of the people.” Land literally just means “land.” In other words, Deutschland basically means something to the effect of “the people's land.”
Germans refer to the people of the Netherlands as "die Niederländer" or "die Holländer". They're called Niederländer or Holländer (depending on how precise you wanna be).
Germans call themselves Deutsche (living in Deutschland). Deutsch is an adjective (Proto-Germanic *theudisk-) derived from Old High German thiota, diota (Proto-Germanic *theudō) meaning "people", "nation", "folk".
Ethnically, about 79-80% of the total population is Dutch, which itself is a mixture of Germanic and Celtic lineages. One group of the Dutch, the Frisians, are both ethnically distinct and also often lumped into the Dutch ethnicity thanks to cultural and historic similarities.
But over time, English-speakers used 'Dutch' to refer to people from the area which is now the Netherlands and Germany, before separating into 'Low Dutch' (people from the lowlands – Belgium and the Netherlands) and 'High Dutch' – the Germans). To this day, we refer to people from the Netherlands as Dutch!