increasing influence of the European Union and the influx of non-Western immigrants in the post-World War II period. In this debate typically Dutch traditions have been put to the foreground. In sociological studies and governmental reports, ethnicity is often referred to with the terms autochtoon and allochtoon. These legal concepts refer to place of birth and citizenship rather than cultural background and do not coincide with the more fluid concepts of ethnicity used by cultural anthropologists. Greater Netherlands As did many European ethnicities during the 19th century, the Dutch also saw the emerging of various Greater Netherlands- and pan-movements seeking to unite the Dutch-speaking peoples across the continent. During the first half of the 20th century, there was a prolific surge in writings concerning the subject. One of its most active proponents was the historian Pieter Geyl, who wrote ('The History of the Dutch tribe/people') as well as numerous essays on the subject. During World War II, when both Belgium and the Netherlands fell to German occupation, fascist elements (such as the NSB and Verdinaso) tried to convince the Nazis into combining the Netherlands and Flanders. The Germans however refused to do so, as this conflicted with their ultimate goal, the ('New Order') of creating a single pan-Germanic racial state. During the entire Nazi occupation, the Germans denied any assistance to Greater Dutch ethnic nationalism, and, by decree of Hitler himself, actively opposed it. The 1970s marked the beginning of formal cultural and linguistic cooperation between Belgium (Flanders) and the Netherlands on an international scale. Statistics The total number of Dutch can be defined in roughly two ways. By taking the total of all people with full Dutch ancestry, according to the current CBS definition, resulting in an estimated 16,000,000 Dutch people, or by the sum of all people with both full and partial Dutch ancestry, which would result in a number around 25,000,000. Linguistics Language Dutch is the main language spoken by most Dutch people. It is a West Germanic language spoken by around 29 million people. Old Frankish, a precursor of the Dutch standard language, was first attested around 500, in a Frankish legal text, the , and has a written record of more than 1500 years, although the material before around 1200 is fragmentary and discontinuous. As a West Germanic language, Dutch is related to other languages in that group such as West Frisian, English and German.