The great majority of inhabitants of The Netherlands are Dutch. They are mainly descended from Franks, Frisians, and Saxons. Most residents of Friesland Province are Frisian, a distinct cultural group with its own language. Fearing overpopulation, the government encouraged Dutch emigration after World War II (1939-1945), and some 500,000 people left. But an even larger number of people entered The Netherlands—Europeans and Asians from the former Netherlands Indies dependency

Popular belief holds that the Dutch are a mixture of Frisians, Saxons, and Franks. In fact, research has made plausible the contention that the autochthonous inhabitants of the region were a mixture of pre-Germanic and Germanic population groups who in the course of time had converged on the main deltaic region of western Europe. There emerged from these groups in the 7th and 8th centuries some major polities based on certain ethnic and cultural unities that then came to be identified as Frisians, Saxons, and Franks.