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The word the Netherlands used for decades to mean "not from here" — officially retired, still very much alive
Part of: Dutch Culture, Dutch History
Allochtoon (pronounced roughly "ah-lock-TONE") comes from Greek: allos (other) + chthon (soil, earth). Literally: someone who emerged from other soil. The opposite is autochtoon — someone whose roots are in this soil. These are old words, but in the Netherlands they took on a very specific administrative and political life that made them unlike anywhere else.
The CBS (Statistics Netherlands) defined allochtoon as anyone with at least one parent born outside the Netherlands. It distinguished:
The third generation — Dutch-born, with Dutch-born parents, but grandparents born abroad — was counted as having a Dutch background. The label stopped at two generations.
Here is where it gets interesting. By the official CBS definition, the largest allochtoon group in the Netherlands was German. Hundreds of thousands of people with a German parent living in the Netherlands, technically allochtoon by the definition.
No one called them that.
In everyday usage, allochtoon meant visibly non-Dutch: Turkish, Moroccan, Surinamese, Antillean. The word had a colour, even though the definition did not. This gap — between what the statistic captured and what the word communicated — was central to why the term became so loaded.
Through the 1990s and 2000s, allochtoon appeared constantly in newspaper headlines about crime rates, school dropout rates, welfare dependency, and failed integration. The word started to carry those associations — not just "person with a parent born abroad" but "problem group." Politicians used it; journalists used it; it became the standard frame.
The second generation — Dutch-born, Dutch-educated, Dutch-speaking — found themselves still labelled allochtoon, still from other soil, despite having no other soil. For many, the word felt like a permanent category that could not be escaped by birth, education, or citizenship.
Amsterdam's city council stopped using it in 2013, citing its divisive effects. The CBS followed on 1 November 2016, replacing allochtoon and autochtoon with persoon met migratieachtergrond (person with migration background) and persoon met Nederlandse achtergrond (person with Dutch background). The definition did not change — only the label.
Yes. The retirement was official, not cultural. The word still appears in conversation, in older journalism, in political speech. Whether someone uses it or avoids it often signals something about their politics and their view of integration. Using migratieachtergrond signals awareness of the debate; using allochtoon ranges from habit to deliberate provocation depending on context.
The debate the word represented — who belongs, how many generations does it take, what does integration actually mean — did not end when the CBS changed its spreadsheet headers.
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