A locale can be composed of both a base language, the country (territory) of use, and possibly codeset (which is usually assumed). For example, German is de, an abbreviationfor Deutsch, while Swiss German is de_CH, CH being an abbreviation for Confederation Helvetica. This allows for specific differences by country, such as currency units notation.
Note -
More than one locale can be associated with a particular language, which allows for regional differences. For example, an English-speaking user in the United States can select the en_US locale (English for the United States), while an English-speaking user in Great Britain canselect en_GB (English for Great Britain).
The key concept for application programs is that of a program's locale. The locale is an explicit model and definition of a native-language environment. The notion of a locale is explicitly defined and included in the library definitionsof the ANSI C Language standard.
The locale consists of a number of categories for which there is country-dependent formatting or other specifications. A program's locale defines its codesets, date and time formatting conventions, monetary conventions, decimal formatting conventions, and collation (sort) order.
Generally the locale name is specified by the LANG environment variable. Locale categories are subordinate to LANG, but can be set separately, in which case they override LANG. If LC_ALL is set, it overrides not only LANG, but all the separate locale categories as well.
Full and Partial Locales
A full Solaris locale has all of the listed functions and the localized system messages in the relevant language. If no localized messages are installed, then all locales would be classified as "partial locales". Several localesin the Solaris environment are capable of displaying localized messages, provided that the relevant language support is installed. For example, there are several locales which can use German messages:
de_DE.ISO8859-1
de_DE.ISO8859-15
de_DE.UTF-8
de_AT.ISO8859-1
de_AT.ISO8859-15
de_CH.ISO8859-1
When the German messages translations are installed using the Language CD, all of the above locales will become "full locales", because they will have access to a fully translated desktop. The language CD contains message translations for the following languages:
German
French
Spanish
Swedish
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Simplified Chinese
Traditional Chinese
All partial locales are also available in the base product, but message translations are available only in the multilingual Solaris product.
