Netherlands Culture & Language

Dutch culture is shaped by trade, by Calvinism, and by the practical necessity of getting along with the neighbours.

Painting

The seventeenth century produced Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals and a market for art unlike anywhere else — ordinary households owned paintings, which is why so many were made and why the subjects are domestic rather than aristocratic or religious. Two centuries later came Van Gogh, and then Mondrian and De Stijl, whose reduction to primary colours and right angles influenced everything from architecture to graphic design.

Design

Dutch design carries an argument: that everyday objects deserve rigour and wit. Rietveld’s chairs, Droog’s conceptual furniture, the graphic identity of Dutch public institutions, and the typography of the Amsterdam School are all part of the same tradition.

Water as culture

Skating on natural ice is a national obsession, and the Elfstedentocht — a two-hundred-kilometre race through eleven Frisian towns — is held only when the ice is thick enough, which has not happened since 1997. The anticipation is itself the tradition.

Food and habits

Not a celebrated cuisine, and the Dutch will say so first. But: haring eaten raw with onion, stroopwafels warmed over a coffee cup, bitterballen with a beer, cheese from Gouda and Edam, and a genuinely excellent Indonesian food tradition brought back from the colonial period, of which the rijsttafel is the local invention.

Tolerance and its limits

The Netherlands legalised same-sex marriage first in the world in 2001, permits assisted dying under strict conditions, and tolerates cannabis sale without legalising production — an arrangement Dutch people describe as illogical and workable.

Dutch is the official language. In Friesland, West Frisian is co-official and is the closest living relative of English after Scots — a fact the Frisians enjoy pointing out.

English is spoken to an extraordinary standard by almost everyone. The Netherlands consistently ranks at or near the top of global English proficiency indices for non-native-speaking countries, and a visitor will never be stuck. Television is subtitled rather than dubbed, which is the usual explanation.

This creates its own difficulty for learners: attempt Dutch and people will switch to English to be helpful, often before you have finished the sentence.

A few words are still appreciated: hallo or goedendag, dank je wel for thank you, alstublieft for please, and lekker, which means tasty and is applied to almost anything good.