A great deal of linguistic research went into creating the collection of locale information in the Windows 95 Registry and the algorithms and tables used by the Win32 NLS API, which includes support for local formats for date, time, calendars, currency, and numbers. The Windows 95 Registry contains more than 90 locale-related strings; in addition, the Win32 NLS API allows each application to request information for any locale.
The Windows 95 default date or time formats are the most commonly used formats for each locale, but applications can provide support for other local conventions. Such conventions are ways of formatting information specific to a language, local dialect, or geographic location. Currency symbols, date formats, calendars, numerical separators, and sorting orders can all be affected by these conventions.
For example, some languages, such as Finnish, German, Polish, and Russian, have several forms for each noun. Windows 95 carries both the nominative and genitive forms of Polish and Russian month names; the form changes depending on the month name's position in the string relative to the day name. For all other languages, Windows 95 carries only one form of each month or day name.
Most locales use the Gregorian calendar, but some editions of Windows 95 also support Hijri (Middle East), Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, and Thai calendars. (Windows 95 will add support for more calendars in the future as necessary.) Although calendars in the United States list Sunday as the first day of the week, calendars in other countries, such as Germany, list Monday as the first day of the week. Similarly, not all cultures assume that the week containing January 1 is the first week of the year. The calendar type that Windows 95 assigns to each locale accommodates such cultural preferences.
Currency and number formats also vary among locales. Reformatting a number based on the locale involves more than changing the currency symbol or the decimal separator. A currency symbol can come before the numerical quantity or it can come after. It might or might not be separated from the number by spaces. The currency symbol can be one, two, or more characters. In addition, if a currency amount is negative, Windows 95 can format it in one of 16 different ways.