Language and Territory Names

A

Language and Territory

An internationalized program makes no assumptions about the language and format of text it is designed to handle. It must work equally well in any locale for data generated internally, text read from or written to files, and messages presented to the user.

To determine locale-specific conventions at run time, programs query system databases, installed in /usr/lib/locale, for cultural data. Applications should identify the proper locale using ISO standard names, presented in the next section.

Standard Locale Names

A locale name is always composed of a language name, sometimes with a territory name appended. SunSoft's list of accepted names for languages and territories follows in Table A-1 on page 66. Language names (all lower case) came from the ISO 639 standard. Territory names (all upper case) came from the ISO 3166 standard. Language is separated from territory by an underscore, and territory is optional.

Some languages have longer, more mnemonic names. For example, JLE accepts the locale name japanese, KLE accepts the locale name korean, HLE accepts the locale name tchinese, and CLE accepts the locale name chinese. The Solaris 2.5 system continues to support these long names.

Table A-1

Locale	Language/Territory	Locale	Language/Territory
C	Default "C" locale	ar	Arabic
bg	Bulgarian	ca	Catalan
co	Corsican	cs	Czech
cy	Welsh	da	Danish
de	German	de_CH	Swiss German
el	Greek	en	English
en_UK	U.K. English	en_US	U.S. English
eo	Esperanto	es	Spanish
eu	Basque	fa	Persian
fi	Finnish	fr	French
fr_BE	Belgian French	fr_CA	Canadian French
fr_CH	Swiss French	fy	Frisian
ga	Irish	gd	Scots Gaelic
hu	Hungarian	is	Icelandic
it	Italian	iw	Hebrew
ja	Japanese	ji	Yiddish
kl	Greenlandic	ko	Korean
lv	Latvian	nl	Dutch
no	Norwegian	pl	Polish
pt	Portuguese	ro	Romanian
ru	Russian	sh	Serbo-Croatian
sk	Slovak	sr	Serbian
sv	Swedish	th	Thai
tr	Turkish	zh	Chinese
zh_TW	Chinese in Taiwan