Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The term Holland has frequently been used informally to refer to the whole of the modern country of the Netherlands in various languages, [34] including Dutch [35] [36] and English. In some languages, Holland is used as the formal name for the Netherlands.
Holland is located in the west of the Netherlands. A maritime region, Holland lies on the North Sea at the mouths of the Rhine and the Meuse (Maas). It contains numerous rivers and lakes, and has an extensive inland canal and waterway system. To the south is Zealand. The region is bordered on the east by the IJsselmeer and four Dutch provinces.
The United Provinces of the Netherlands, commonly referred to in historiography as the Dutch Republic, was a confederation that existed from 1579 until the Batavian Revolution in 1795. It was a predecessor state of the present-day Netherlands and the first independent Dutch nation state.
From the beginning, the VOC used the cape as a place to supply ships travelling between the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies. There was a close association between the cape and these Dutch possessions in the far east. Van Riebeeck and the VOC began to import large numbers of slaves, primarily from Madagascar and Indonesia.
The Kingdom of the Netherlands (Dutch: Koninkrijk der Nederlanden, pronounced [ˈkoːnɪŋkrɛiɡ dɛr ˈneːdərlɑndə(n)] ⓘ; [h], West Frisian: Keninkryk fan de Nederlannen, Papiamento: Reino Hulandes), commonly known simply as the Netherlands, [i] is a sovereign state consisting of a collection of constituent territories united under the monarch of the Netherlands, who functions as head ...
By taking the total of all people with full Dutch ancestry, according to the current CBS definition (both parents born in the Netherlands), resulting in an estimated 16,000,000 Dutch people, [note 1] or by the sum of all people worldwide with both full and partial Dutch ancestry, which would result in a number around 33,000,000.
In most other Dutch provinces, particularly in the south including Flanders (Belgium), the word Hollander is commonly used in either colloquial or pejorative sense to refer to the perceived superiority or supposed arrogance of people from the Randstad – the main conurbation of Holland proper and of the Netherlands.
The official language of the Netherlands is Dutch, spoken by almost all people in the Netherlands. Dutch is also spoken and official in Aruba, Brussels, Curaçao, Flanders, Sint Maarten and Suriname. It is a West Germanic, Low Franconian language that originated in the Early Middle Ages (c. 470) and was standardized in the 16th century.