Locale - Definition and Overview

In computing, locale is a set of parameters that defines the user's language, country and any special variant preferences that the user wants to see in their user interface. Usually a locale identifier consists of at least a language identifier and a region identifier.

Locales identifiers can be defined in several ways:

• Locale Identifier (LCID) on Windows, a number such as 0x0409 for English in the United States or 0x0411 for Japanese in Japan.
• In XML, Windows .NET, Java and other Unicode based environments, they are defined in a format similar to RFC 3066 or one of its successors. They are usually defined with just ISO 639 and ISO 3166 codes.
• On Unix, Linux and other POSIX type platforms, they are defined similar to the RFC 3066 definition, but the locale variant modifier is defined differently, and the charset is included as a part of the identifier. It is defined this this format [language[_territory][.codeset][@modifier]]

See also:

• ISO 639 language codes
• ISO 3166 country codes
• Charsets : e.g. UTF-8

External links

• RFC 3066 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3066.txt)
• Registration of Special RFC 3066 Langauge Tags (http://www.iana.org/assignments/language-tags)
• LCID information from Microsoft (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/intl/nls_2jzn.asp)
• POSIX Environment Variables (http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xbd/envvar.html)
• Debian Wiki on Locales (http://wiki.debian.net/index.cgi?Locale)
• Low Level Technical details on defining a POSIX locale (http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/xbd_chap07.html)
• Common XML Locale Repository (http://openi18n.org/subgroups/lade/locale/)
• Locale Explorer (http://oss.software.ibm.com/cgi-bin/icu/lx/de/?d_l=en)
• Article "The Standard C++ Locale (http://cantrip.org/locale.html)" by Nathan C. Myers
• java.util.Locale (http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/java/util/Locale.html)
• Internationalization services (http://docs.python.org/lib/module-locale.html) - Python Library Reference