Locale Identifiers

Each locale has a unique identifier (LCID), a 32-bit value that consists of a language identifier and a sort identifier. The identifier supplied in an LCID is a standard international numeric abbreviation. This LCID has the components necessary to uniquely identify one of the installed system-defined locales. The LCID is constructed using the MAKELCID macro. The following illustration shows the format of the bits in an LCID.

+-------------+---------+-------------------------+
|   Reserved  | Sort ID |      Language ID        |
+-------------+---------+-------------------------+
31         20 19     16 15                      0   bit

The predefined locale identifiers are:

• LOCALE_SYSTEM_DEFAULT, which identifies the system default locale.
• LOCALE_USER_DEFAULT, which identifies the locale of the current user.

An application can retrieve the current locale identifiers by using the GetSystemDefaultLCID and GetUserDefaultLCID functions.