
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 ...