Locales

In software, a locale specifies a choice of language-, country-, and culture-specific ways of representing common kinds of information, specifically

• time: 2:00 PM vs. 14:00
• dates: 3/2/2006 vs. 2006-3-2
• numbers: 1,000,000.1 vs. 1.000.000,1
• currency: $100 vs. USD100
• character set and encoding: extended ASCII vs. Unicode UTF-8
• measurements: US vs. SI (metric)

Locale names are commonly constructed from abbreviations for countries and languages, sometimes with character set appended. For example, en-us.utf8 specifies conventions appropriate to US English, with Unicode character set in UTF-8 encoding. The en-us locale differs on many but not all points from en-gb (Great Britain) or en-ca (Canada) and so on. All of these are significantly different from hi-in (Hindi in India) or zh-tw (Traditional Chinese in Taiwain).