Dutch culture: what the Netherlands speaks, paints and celebrates

Which languages the Netherlands recognises

Dutch is the official language and almost everyone in the country speaks it. It is a West Germanic language of the Low Franconian group, traceable to the early medieval period around the year 470 and standardised in the sixteenth century, and it is official in six countries: the Netherlands, Belgium, Suriname, Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten.

Three other languages hold formal standing inside the Dutch state, each by a different instrument and to a different depth.

Low Saxon and Limburgish both continue across the German border and belong to a dialect continuum that pays no attention to it. Recognition under the Charter obliges the state to protect them; it confers nothing like the position Frisian holds.

How Frisian is kept alive

Frisian is the only language other than Dutch that a Dutch government body uses to govern. The province of Fryslân administers in it, and central government and the province negotiate written agreements covering its use in schools and in the media, renewed on a fixed cycle.

The instruments are practical. The regional broadcaster Omrop Fryslân is funded to produce in Frisian. The theatre company Tryater is carried inside the national cultural infrastructure and works in Frisian on stage and in schools. An open-air musical theatre organisation produces in Frisian and in local dialect through the summer. An independent body advises both governments on the language, and the province holds a designated role as its steward.

The stated target is that more Frisians should be able to read and write the language by 2030, which is an admission about the present: speaking it is common in Fryslân and writing it is not, and a language taught mainly by ear does not produce readers. Leeuwarden was European Capital of Culture in 2018 with a programme built around multilingualism, and was named a UNESCO City of Literature in 2019.

Why the Golden Age produced so many paintings

Seventeenth-century Dutch painting was made for a market rather than for a court or a church, and the market was unusually wide. Merchants, guilds, civic militia companies and boards of regents all commissioned work, and the output was so large that prices fell substantially during the period.

From the 1620s the Dutch painters broke from the Baroque manner practised in neighbouring Flanders and moved towards close description of the visible world. Four categories were effectively established there, and European art drew on them for the next two centuries: landscape, cityscape, still life and the genre scene of ordinary life. Many of those apparently plain scenes carry a proverb or a moral, and the meaning is not always recoverable now.

The group portrait shows how directly the market shaped the picture. A civic guard or a board would commission one collectively and each sitter would pay individually, and the sum paid determined the position: full length and in the foreground, or a face at the back. Where everyone paid the same, the placement itself became the quarrel.

The period ended with the French invasion of 1672 and never fully recovered, though a twilight ran to about 1710.

What a canal house says about tax

The tall narrow houses along the Amsterdam canals are narrow because a house was taxed on the width of its façade. Depth and height cost nothing, so a merchant built a deep house behind a slim front and hoisted goods to the upper floors on a beam that is still there.

The ornament went on the façade for the same reason: it was the part that was seen, and it was where a new commercial fortune announced itself. Behind that, the architecture of the first republic in northern Europe was deliberately restrained, quoting classical antiquity and holding off the Roman high Baroque that was reaching Antwerp in the same decades. Sobriety was a civic statement.

The nineteenth century produced a countervailing swing. A Catholic architect working in a Gothic Revival manner built the Rijksmuseum between 1876 and 1885 and Amsterdam's central station between 1881 and 1889, in a Protestant-governed country, and both buildings remain the most conspicuous in the city.

How Calvinism shaped a tolerant country

What the revolt settled

Catholic Christianity was the only mainstream religion in the Low Countries until the Reformation. During the sixteenth century large numbers adopted Lutheran, Anabaptist, Calvinist and Mennonite forms of Protestantism; the Spanish crown suppressed them; and the revolt that followed was partly a religious one. The rebel provinces united at Utrecht in 1579 and declared independence in 1581, which Spain accepted only in 1648.

The republic that emerged took Calvinism as a state religion in practice and never established it formally, and it extended a working tolerance to those outside it. That tolerance had limits and was granted rather than owed, but it made the country a destination for people whom other states expelled, and it is the origin of a reputation the Netherlands has carried since.

The modern policy inheritance runs from the same root by way of the pillar system: a society organised into separate confessional and ideological blocs, each running its own institutions, learned to accommodate what it could not absorb. Dutch law on drugs, prostitution, same-sex marriage, abortion and assisted dying is among the most permissive anywhere, and the through-line is a preference for regulating a practice over prohibiting it.

How the country became religiously plural

The confessional map changed faster in the twentieth century than in the four preceding it. Islam is the largest faith after Christianity, with about 825,000 adherents in 2012, some 5% of the population, arriving first with migrant workers from Turkey and Morocco in the 1960s, then from the former colonies of Suriname and Indonesia, and in the 1990s with refugees from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Iran, Iraq, Somalia and Afghanistan.

Hinduism has roughly 215,000 adherents, a little over 1%, most of them Indo-Surinamese, whose ancestors had been carried from India to Suriname as indentured labour and who moved to the Netherlands when Suriname became independent. There are an estimated 250,000 Buddhists or people drawn to Buddhism, mostly of Dutch background, and about 45,000 Jews.

The largest single movement of the period was out of religion altogether. The pillars that organised Dutch life were confessional, and their collapse from the 1960s left a majority reporting no religious affiliation, in a country whose institutions, schools and broadcasters had been built along denominational lines and in many cases still carry the names.

Why almost everyone cycles

Cycling accounts for 27% of all trips made in the Netherlands, urban and rural together. That is a policy outcome rather than a national temperament: the infrastructure was built deliberately from the 1970s, after a decade in which road deaths rose and a campaign against them changed how streets were designed.

What the design produces is separation. Cyclists get their own carriageway, their own signals and their own priority at junctions, and the network is continuous enough that a route can be completed without joining traffic. The country is also flat and compact, which lowers the cost of the choice.

The social effect is visible in who cycles: people of every age, in ordinary clothes, covering a short distance, with the bicycle as the default and the car as the alternative. Children ride to school unaccompanied from an age at which that would be remarkable elsewhere, and the design of the network is what makes that a reasonable decision rather than a brave one.

What the Dutch actually celebrate

Two occasions dominate the calendar and neither is Christmas.

Sinterklaas falls on the evening of 5 December, the eve of the saint's day, and is above all a children's festival of gifts and rhymes. The figure travelled to North America with Dutch settlers and merged with Father Christmas to produce Santa Claus, so the Dutch original and the global commercial figure are the same saint twice. The saint's companion, Zwarte Piet, has been the subject of sustained argument: critics hold the blackface depiction to be a racist caricature, defenders have held it to be a children's tradition without racial content, and depictions have changed in many places while the dispute continues.

King's Day is the national holiday, held on 27 April and moved to the Saturday if it would fall on a Sunday. Its distinctive feature is the vrijmarkt, a day on which anyone may sell second-hand possessions in the street without a licence, so the country turns into an open-air market. The other feature is orange, the colour of the royal house, worn to an extent that has its own name.

What Dutch cooking is built on

Dutch cuisine has a narrow traditional range and a wide regional spread inside it. The base is dairy, vegetables and bread, with meat historically eaten in smaller quantity than in the surrounding countries, and pastry eaten in large quantity. The cheeses are the export the country is known for: Gouda, Edam and Leiden are named after the towns that traded them rather than the farms that made them.

The southern provinces are the exception to the plainness. Their cooking borders on Flanders, draws on French and German practice, and is the one Dutch culinary region to have produced a haute cuisine; most traditional Dutch restaurant cooking descends from it. Wine was largely absent from the Dutch table until recent decades, and the traditional drinks are beer and the spirits jenever and brandewijn.

What changed the everyday diet was empire and then labour migration. Indonesian cooking arrived with the colonial relationship and is now so thoroughly domesticated that a version of it counts as ordinary Dutch takeaway. Surinamese food followed independence in 1975, and Turkish and Moroccan cooking followed the guest-worker migration that began in the 1960s. In the larger cities those cuisines are not a minority option; they are what people eat.

How Dutch popular music found its own language

Dutch popular music has followed British and American currents more closely than that of most non-English-speaking European countries. Dutch rock and pop emerged in the 1960s, and for two decades its lyrics were mostly in English; several bands of that period sold internationally.

The turn to Dutch came in the 1980s, prompted by the commercial success of a band working in the language, and both now coexist, with some artists recording in each. A Dutch and Belgian house scene in the early 1990s produced acts that sold across Europe.

Dutch-language rap matured in the mid-1990s and became popular in the Netherlands and in Flanders. In the present century it has been shaped most by artists of North African, Caribbean and Middle Eastern background, which makes it the part of Dutch culture where the country's post-war immigration is most audible.

The Caribbean parts of the Kingdom run a separate musical tradition that rarely reaches the European mainland charts. Aruba, Curaçao and Bonaire lie in the Lesser Antilles and their music mixes indigenous, African and Dutch elements with the currents of the neighbouring islands. Curaçao has the most active scene of the three and gave its name to tumba, a form named for the drums that carry it, and Suriname has exported its own kaseko to the islands with considerable success.