Unicode Explained

Problems with Aspects of Localization

As mentioned earlier in this chapter, locales are mostly about languages, not locality.

However, the selection of a locale is very often presented to the user as a matter of

choosing a country or area. Yet it is currently impossible to specify locale settings as

applying to a country or other geographic area independently of language. Territory

codes can only be used as a subcode after a language code.

This will hopefully be fixed somehow, making language and territory orthogonal as-

pects of “localeness.” Few localization-relevant things can be reasonably described as

belonging to a form of a language as spoken in a particular country, as opposed to the

language in general. Such features include the different rules for quotation marks in

U.S. English and British English. On the other hand, there are things that should depend

on the geographic position alone. The default time zone might be one of them. For

some large countries, the country code alone would not imply a meaningful default.

The point is that the time zone is not derivable from language, even when a specific

variant of language is specified.

Language selection menus often contain country-specific variants of languages for no

good reason: the choice between them usually has no effect. The language forms could

be different, but not in a manner that affects the behavior of programs. Spellchecks are ...