Locale Names

A locale is neither a language nor a country, the same language may be spoken in multiple countries (often with subtle differences) and a single country may speak multiple languages. A locale is therefore an area where a particular language is spoken which may (or may not) align with geographical and/or political boundaries. In multi-lingual countries it is common for the same user to switch between languages many times a day.

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.

A locale also includes regional standards for date and time formatting, for example French-Canadians use a different date format to English-Canadians and both of those are different to the date format used in France. The locale should also affect the sort order (collation) of text but implementation of that is not always complete or consistent across software packages.

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.

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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.

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.

Related

Time Zones - A full, sortable list of time zones.
ISO 3166-1 - Alpha-2 and Alpha-3 region codes, Wikipedia.
Language Identifier Constants and Strings - MSDN.
LCID Reference -
Localepurge - Shell script to recover disk space used by unneeded localizations.
Windows Date formats.
Registry: HKCU\Control Panel\International\LocaleName
PowerShell: Get-WinSystemLocale
PowerShell script to generate this page.
ISO 8601 - Standard date and time notation.
CHCP - Active console OEM Code Page.