While residents of the city of Groningen have long been referred to a “Stadjers”, a campaign from MartiniPlaza has come up with a new name for the inhabitants of the redrawn borders of the municipality: “Stadlanders”.
Translation by Traci White
The newly expanded municipality of Groningen now includes Ten Boer and Haren, and according to the Groninger Internet Courant is now the fifth most populous in the entire Netherlands.
With the new municipality officially coming into existence on 1 January, RTV Noord reports that MartiniPlaza held a competition for people to come up with a new name for inhabitants of Groningen. The winning entry was “Stadlander”, which refers to a person who lives in a village in the vicinity of a large city and therefore benefits from access to both urban and rural life.
Other popular entries, which were announced by director Willem de Kok during the third annual New Year’s Festival at the cultural venue, were “Nulvieftigger” (050-er, referring to the city area code) and “Pronkjewailer” (“Pronkjewail” means “jewel” in the Gronings dialect). Around 1,000 people voted in the contest to come up with a new way to describe the people who live within the redrawn municipal borders.
