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Holland or Netherlands or Dutch

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(Map)

Both. Kinda. The country is known as the Netherlands (Nederland in Dutch). Holland is the name of the name of two of the twelve provinces that make up the Netherlands. North Holland (Noord Holland) is the home to Amsterdam while South Holland (Zuid Holland) is home to The Hague (Den Haag). The Hague is the "political" capital of the Netherlands while Amsterdam is the "real" capital. You have probably heard on the news about The Hague. It is in a way the political capital wester Europe. The European Union Courts are located there. I guess in a way the next powerful political establishment outside the UN. So the Dutch are Nederlanders but translated into english it is just Dutch.

The reason that Holland is used interchangeably as the name of the country is that that is the most influential province of the country. We really don't have an example here in America. It would be like if the United States would be called Texas or something. I'm sure Texans would love to do that but we really don't have one completely dominate state.

Thanks to Yahoo answers I found out that the term Dutch comes from Diets an old word meaning "The People" and the English called the people there Dutch since there used to be a Duchy of Holland and that would get confusing having two areas known as Holland.
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  1. AnonymousOctober 21, 2010 at 12:37 PM

    Very informative. Kinda confused by what you mean in the last paragraph. And I thought of and example for "Holland". People call Amercians Yankee's but you have to be from New York to truly be a Yankee. Or at lest New England.

    Purple Panther

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