Language Identifiers

A language identifier is a standard international numeric abbreviation for a country or geographical region. Each language has a unique language identifier (LANGID), a 16-bit value that consists of a primary language identifier and a sublanguage identifier. The LANGID is constructed using the MAKELANGID macro. The following illustration shows the format of the bits in a LANGID.

+-------------------------+-------------------------+
|  SubLanguage ID  |   Primary Language ID   |
+-------------------------+-------------------------+
15                    10  9                         0   bit

There are predefined language identifiers:

• LANG_SYSTEM_DEFAULT, which identifies the system default language.
• LANG_USER_DEFAULT, which identifies the language of the current user.

An application can retrieve the current language identifiers by using the GetSystemDefaultLangID and GetUserDefaultLangID functions.