Locale

This article is about the concept. For the Unix/Linux command, see locale (command).

A locale is a object on the system that stores information relevant to localization. Such information stored is formating for numbers, text, times, money, as well as what language to speak, and character encoding to use. The localedef utility is used to create locales. On most systems, the directory /usr/lib/locale holds all system wide locales, and /usr/share/locales holds internationalization text for programs.