Locale Names

A locale is neither a language nor a country. The population of a single country may speak multiple languages and the same language may be spoken in multiple countries, often with subtle differences, thus requiring multiple locales for the same language.

A locale is therefore an area where a particular language is spoken which may (or may not) align with geographical and/or political boundaries.

A locale will affect:

• The language displayed by Operating System prompts and help.
• The sort order (collation) of text.
• Standard defaults for date and time formatting.
• In calendars, the start day of each week.
• Keyboard support: QWERTY vs AZERTY.
• The default currency symbol: $ / £ / ¥

To jump to a Locale, press [ a – z ] on the keyboard to scroll it into view.

Prior to the advent of Unicode, locales along with code pages would provide support for specific character sets. With Unicode and a suitable unicode font, any language character is supported under any locale. In multi-lingual countries it is common for a person to switch between languages many times a day.

Locale names (BCP 47) are based on ISO 639-1 language tags with an ISO 3166 country code appended as needed. Language Code Identifiers (LCIDs) traditionally used in Microsoft Windows are deprecated and their use is discouraged in favour of the BCP 47 standard.

Each LCID can be represented by a BCP 47 locale tag, but the reverse is not true. Language tags can include additional subtags to support multiple language variants and character scripts within each country.

The locale identifier LOCALE_CUSTOM_UNSPECIFIED (0x1000, or 4096) is assigned to any culture that does not have a unique locale identifier and does not have complete system-provided data.

Cantonese yue/zh-yue also exists but currently has very little support.

In Windows PowerShell, to retrieve the current locale (short code) use:

PS C:\> Get-WinSystemLocale

or to list all the installed language packs:
PS C:\> $os = Get-CIMInstance -computerName computer64 -ClassName Win32_OperatingSystem
PS C:\> [CultureInfo[]]$os.MUILanguages

Not all software packages will fully support all locales, so for example SQL database sort orders may not handle alphabetical sorting for every locale correctly even when the OS does.

“Peace, for us, is an asset and in our interest. It is an absolute human asset that allows an individual to freely develop his individuality unbound by any regional, religious, or ethnic fetters” ~ Yasser Arafat

Related

Countries - A full, sortable list of all countries with languages, locales, population and ISO code.
Time Zones - A full, sortable list of time zones.
ISO 8601 - Standard date and time notation.
Date command with formats - Windows CMD.
ISO 639-2 - Alpha-2 language name codes, Wikipedia.
Language Identifier Constants and Strings - Microsoft.
LCID Reference - PDFs with Windows Language Code Identifiers (deprecated).
Localepurge - Shell script to recover disk space used by unneeded localizations.
Registry: HKCU\Control Panel\International\LocaleName
PowerShell: Get-WinSystemLocale / Set-Culture - Set the user culture for the current user account.
PowerShell script to generate this page.
CHCP - Active console OEM Code Page.