The Netherlands (Nederland) in 95 languages: Amsterdam and provinces

Low Countries and Holland: two families of names

Most names in the table belong to one of two families. The first translates the idea of low land. Dutch Nederland, German Niederlande and Swedish Nederländerna keep the Germanic word; French Pays-Bas, Spanish Países Bajos, Italian Paesi Bassi and Catalan Països Baixos say low countries in Romance form. The idea goes back to the Burgundian and Habsburg rulers, who called their territories the lands over here and the lands down here, a phrase that contemporary Dutch official documents translated into Dutch.

The second family takes the name of one region for the whole. Holland is strictly the area of the two provinces North and South Holland, once the County of Holland, but its weight in the Dutch Republic and the wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries made it a pars pro toto. Greek Ολλανδία, Arabic هولندا, Hebrew הולנד, Hungarian Hollandia and Tagalog Olandiya all come from it. In January 2020 the Dutch government announced that it would promote the country abroad as the Netherlands.

Some languages keep both. Russian lists Нидерланды, Голландия and Hindi नीदरलैंड, हालैंड. Persian has four forms, هلند, هلاند, ندرلند, پئی با, the last of which matches French Pays-Bas.

West Frisian, the second official language in the province of Friesland, calls the country Nederlân and the province Fryslân. ISO 3166-2 lists the province under that Frisian name, the only unit of the Netherlands it gives in a language other than Dutch.

What changed in 2010

Until 2010 the kingdom had three parts: the Netherlands in Europe, Aruba, which had become a constituent country in 1986, and the Netherlands Antilles with their seat in Willemstad. The Antilles were dissolved on 10 October 2010. Curaçao and Sint Maarten became countries within the kingdom like Aruba, while Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba joined the Netherlands proper as special municipalities outside any province.

ISO followed on 13 December 2011 by adding all six units to ISO 3166-2:NL. A year earlier, on 15 December 2010, ISO 3166-1 had already given the three special municipalities the joint code BQ, under the name Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba, and Curaçao and Sint Maarten the codes CW and SX.

The capital question has a Dutch answer of its own. Amsterdam is the capital under the constitution, while the government, the parliament and the royal family sit in The Hague. Dutch has two names for that city, the formal 's-Gravenhage and the everyday Den Haag; Zuid-Holland has its provincial seat there too.

Flag of the Netherlands

The flag is a horizontal triband of red, white and blue in the proportion 2:3. The red is a bright vermilion and the blue a cobalt blue. Its first full-colour depiction dates from 1575, and the red was reaffirmed in 1937.