Locale

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This page is about locales as used in software localization. For the use of the term locale in order theory and pointless topology, see complete Heyting algebra.

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.

Locale identifiers can be defined in several ways:

Locale Identifier (LCID) for unmanaged code on Microsoft Windows, a number such as 1033 for English (United States) or 1041 for Japanese (Japan). These numbers consist of a language code (lower 10 bits) and culture code (upper bits) and are therefore often written in hexadecimal notation, such as 0x0409 or 0x0411.
In XML, Microsoft .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 3166-1 alpha-2 codes.
- Microsoft is beginning to introduce unmanaged code APIs for .NET that use this format. One of the first to be generally released is a function to mitigate issues with internationalized domain names [1], but more are in Windows Vista Beta 1.
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 in this format: