Locales

Glossary

• Locale: The features of the user's environment that are dependent on language, country/region, and cultural conventions. The locale determines conventions such as sort order; keyboard layout; and date, time, number, and currency formats. In Windows, locales usually provide more information about cultural conventions than about languages.
• Locale-sensitive: Exhibiting different behavior or returning different data, depending on the locale. For example, the Win32 sorting functions return different results depending on the locale parameter sent to each function.
• National standard: A linguistic rule, measurement, educational guide-line, or technology-related convention as defined by a government or an industry standards organization. Examples include character sets, key-board layouts, and some cultural conventions, such as punctuation. Windows incorporates many International Standards Organization (ISO) naming conventions.
• Script: A system of characters used to write one or several languages. Characters denote isolated sounds, syllables, or word elements and are governed by a general set of rules for creating text, such as default writing direction.
• Separators: Symbols used to separate items in a list, mark the thousands place in numbers, or represent a decimal point. Different locales follow different conventions for separators.

Geographically speaking, a locale is a place. In software terms, a locale is a set of information associated with a place. Locale information on Windows includes the name and identifier of the spoken language, the script used to write the language, and cultural conventions. (See Figure 1-1 below.) Locale-sensitive standards include keyboard layouts, default paper sizes and envelope sizes, common printers, common monitor resolutions, character sets or character encoding ranges, text directionality (left-to-right or right-to-left, horizontal or vertical), and input methods. Chapters 4 and 5 discuss different aspects of locale information in detail.

Locale	English (United States)	French (Standard)	Japanese	United Arab Emirates (UAE) Arabic
Country/Region	United States	France	Japan	United Arab Emirates
Language	English	French	Japanese	Arabic
Written Script(s)	Latin	Latin	Kana, kanji	Arabic
Direction of Text	Left to right	Left to right	Left to right horizontally or right to left vertically	Right to left
Windows Defined Code Page	1252	1252	932	1256
Currency Symbol	$	F	¥
Long Date Format	January 15, 1995	15 January 1995		15. January 1995
Short Date Format	1/15/95	15/01/1995	95/01/15	95/01/15
Time Format	1:00 pm	13:00	13:00	1:00
Calendar	Gregorian	Gregorian	Gregorian or Imperial	Gregorian
Default Paper Size	US Letter (81/2 x 11 ins)	A4 (210 x 297 mm)	A4 (210 x 297 mm)	A4 (210 x 297 mm)
Decimal Separator	.	,	.	,
List Separator	,	;	,	;
Thousands Separator	,	Space	,	,

Figure 1-1 Selected default information for several locales.

Windows supports a large set of locales, which it tags with language and sublanguage pairs. The sublanguage generally corresponds to a country/region. One way to think of this is in terms of the phrase "X language as spoken in Y country/region." The way people speak or write a particular language may not change dramatically from one country/region to the next (German as spoken in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, for example), but cultural conventions and national standards often differ.

Microsoft Windows 95 supports 75 locales, and Microsoft Windows NT 3.5 supports 50. Windows supports four Chinese-language locales (Hong Kong SAR, China, the People's Republic of China, Singapore, and Taiwan), six English locales (Australia, Britain, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United States), and five French locales (Belgium, Canada, France [Standard], Luxembourg, and Switzerland). In addition, Windows 95 supports 16 Arabic locales (Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen).