The Dutch (Dutch: Nederlanders) are a Germanic ethnic group and nation native to the Netherlands. They share a common ancestry and culture and speak the Dutch language. Dutch people and their descendants are found in

The ideologies associated with (Romantic) Nationalism of the 19th and 20th centuries never really caught on in the Netherlands, and this, together with being a relatively mono-ethnic society up until the late 1950s, has led to a relatively obscure use of the terms nation and

Language
Dutch is the main language spoken by most Dutch people. It is a West Germanic language spoken by around 29 million people. Old Frankish, a precursor of the Dutch standard language, was first attested around 500, in a

The largest patterns of human genetic variation within the Netherlands show strong correlations with geography and distinguish between: (1) North and South; (2) East and West; and (3) the middle-band and the rest of the country. The distribution of gene

Emergence
As with all ethnic groups, the ethnogenesis of the Dutch (and their predecessors) has been a lengthy and complex process. Though the majority of the defining characteristics (such as language, religion, architecture or cuisine) of

The total number of Dutch can be defined in roughly two ways. By taking the total of all people with full Dutch ancestry, according to the current CBS definition, resulting in an estimated 16,000,000 Dutch people, or by the sum of all people with both full and partial Dutch

Religion
Prior to the arrival of Christianity, the ancestors of the Dutch adhered to a form of Germanic paganism augmented with various