Muiderslot, in Holland (regardless of definition)

Seemingly coming out of nowhere, to me at least, this is suddenly a thing. On the Internet as well as in real life. Everywhere and often, suddenly, people seem to have a pressing need to say out loud that they know — and to correct people who don’t know — that Holland is not the english name for my country. It is called the Netherlands. And they are quick to add that the dutch may be offended by calling it Holland; especially those dutch who happen to live outside that region of the Netherlands that is called Holland, which is supposed to mean the combined provinces of North Holland and South Holland.

You see this e.g. in YouTube videos with travel tips about the Netherlands (like this, otherwise excellent video) and reddit comments (like this from today). It is consistently making it high up on the lists of things you should know about the Netherlands. In real life, I hear new software engineering hires here at ActiveVideo repeat it unsolicited when they come in fresh from another country. I hear it is in expat guides.

Let me start off by admitting that these people are right. On both counts. The official name of my country is Nederland. It is true that the best name to refer to this country in the english language would be The Netherlands. It is undoubtedly also true that you would be able to find a fool or two who feel left out when you refer to only the two most crowded provinces of our country, where most of the fun is, where most of the money and decisions are made and where our infrastructure is best.

What is not true is that it is a thing. It isn’t and never was. It is not important to us, and shouldn’t be to you.

So, about that sudden explosion of references: maybe it’s me. I don’t remember this ever being brought up when I was young or in relatively recent years. Maybe through cyber-balkanisation I’ve somehow ended up in corners of the internet where this is important to repeat. Someone said to me in that reddit comment that he would get points deducted on his topography test in school when he would write Holland, so he learned it years ago. Maybe it is a long running debate or mantra in the USA. I have a faint suspicion however that the recent explosion of references was nurtured by this video that went viral a few years ago explaining the difference between Holland and the Netherlands:

That was a great video! Kudos to those folks at CGP Grey who made this. It gave us a good chuckle, too. And nothing is strictly, factually incorrect in there. It is just exaggerating things more than a bit, to serve its format. It was meant to be funny.

In reality, although the region Holland may formally exist, no one I know would ever use it in daily dutch language in any context, as for example in “Annie and Herman took the train to Holland this morning” (And I have lived for extended periods in the North, the East and the South of the Netherlands, as well as in the dutch speaking ex-colonial island of Curaçao in the Caribbean.)

In fact, we hardly don’t use the word Holland at all. We have no need. For the country, we have Nederland. (Of course, the provinces we call by their name, North Holland and South Holland).

When you say Holland, 1) you are correct, 2) we don’t notice and 3) we don’t care.

You are correct, because most english dictionaries correctly identify it as a synonym of The Netherlands.

You are correct, also, because when you refer to Holland it is very likely to mean that specific part anyway. Naysayers hardly stand a chance. When you say “I’m going to Holland”, you will likely land at Schiphol, go see Amsterdam, maybe Rotterdam, The Hague, de keukenhof, Gouda and whatever nice things there are to see in the provinces of North Holland and South Holland. Your vacation is short, plenty to see in that region. Extending it into the other provinces happens, but I guess is not too common. When you say “My company has a branch in Holland”, it’s likely to be in North or South Holland, indeed. etc.

We don’t notice because english is not our mother tongue. An incredible 90% of us speak it. This means we can say our thing by choosing from our limited english vocabulary and try to twist them into english looking sentence ordering and depending on chance you may get anything from dunglish to near perfect english from our mouths. When receiving, it means we understand the gist of what you are saying to us in your superset vocabulary, too fast. The gist we get, the subtleties are lost on us. And as we have very international exposure, we hear someone say torch one day, and someone else say flashlight the next day (fun fact: Haynes vehicle repair manuals have a mini dictionary and caution american readers that, when they write ‘light a torch to look into your carburettor’, they certainly don’t mean open fire) . We hear sweater one day and jumper the next. We hear The Netherlands one day and Holland the next. The trick is, under time and language processing pressure, you have to become super insensitive, just roughly bundle them up and somehow bring up a mental picture of what that would be in dutch, respectively, a zaklantaarn, a trui and Nederland.

We don’t notice, also, because it is very common to have a name for a country in a foreign language which does not in any way resemble the name the country locals have for it. France calls us Les Pays Bas. Germany calls itself Deutschland. We all call Hungary Hungary, while they call themselves Magyarország. These things happen and should be of no consequence. And that you choose to have two names for us and mix them is basically just flattering and we’ll somehow take it as a sign of our importance despite our size and go on with daily routine.

We don’t care, because pars pro toto, the figure where you mention a part to refer to the whole, is a thing of every day. Languages are full with it. When you say the city of Los Gatos has 30,545 souls, no one should complain that their left foot and right eye socket are not counted.

Like no bolognese sauce was ever mad when you simply said you ate spaghetti, no person from the Netherlands should care that you chose to call us after our main ingredient, Holland.

Like no bolognese sauce was ever mad when you simply said you ate spaghetti, no person from the Netherlands should care that you chose to call us after our main ingredient, Holland.

The reverse of a pars pro toto is a totum pro parte. This is where you name something for a larger whole, but you only mean a part. When you say San Francisco will meet New York in the ballgame tonight, it’s mostly some players and supporters that will actually be meeting, not skyscrapers.

To me, the perfect equivalent of “You shouldn’t call the Netherlands Holland, some dutch may be upset” is “You should not call the United States of America America. Some Americans may be upset”. It is factually true. The name of the country is the United States of America. America is a continent (or at least, North America and South America are). People in Chile may theoretically be upset when you say ‘Americans are rich’.

That is about the magnitude of this issue. Not more.

Let me close off by saying that the official tourist board for the Netherlands is www.holland.com and that Holland, as a whole, is more than worth a visit.

TL;DR: Someone was wrong on the Internet. Holland is in fact a perfectly acceptable synonym for the Netherlands and no one is offended.