6 ms·

> People are not limited to a single locale. For example, I can read and write English (USA), English (UK), German, and Russian. Which locale should I set my co

> People are not limited to a single locale. For example, I can read and write English (USA), English (UK), German, and Russian. Which locale should I set my computer to? Ideally - the "English-World" locale is supposedly meant for us, cosmopolitans. It's included with Windows 10 and 11. Practically, as "English-World" was not available in the past (and still wasn't available on platforms other than Windows the last time I checked), I have always been setting the locale to En-US even though I have never been to America. This leads to a number of annoyances though. E.g. LibreOffice always creates new documents for the Letter paper format and I have to switch it to A4 manually every time. It's even worse on Linux where locales appear to be less easy to customize than in Windows. Windows always offered a handy configuration dialog to granularly tweak your locale choosing what measures system you prefer, whether your weeks begin on sundays or mondays and even define your preferred date-time format templates fully manually. A less-spoken about problem is Windows' system-wide setting for the default legacy codepage. I happen to use single-language legacy (non-Unicode) apps made by people from a number of very different countries. Some apps (e.g. I can remeber the Intel UHD Windows driver config app) even use this setting (ignoring the system locale and system UI language) to detect your language and render their whole UI in it. > English (USA), English (UK) This deserves a separate discussion. I doubt many English speakers (let alone those who don't live in a particular anglophone country) care to distinguish between English dialects. To us presence of a huge number of these (don't forget en-AU, en-TT, en-ZW etc - there are more!) in the options lists brings only annoyance, especially when one chooses some non-US one and this opens another can of worms. By the way I wonder how do string capitalization and comparision functions manage to work on computers of people who use both English and Turkish actively (Turkish locale distinguishes between dotted and undotted İ).

DoughnutHole 3y ago
> I doubt many English speakers care to distinguish between English dialects It's worthwhile purely for the sake of autocorrect/typo highlighting in text-editing software. I don't miss the days of spelling a word correctly in my version of English but still being stuck with the visual noise of red highlighting up and down the document because it doesn't conform to US English.
- BoxOfRain 3y ago
  Yeah I'd rather not have my British English dialect seen as second-class in a world of American English ideally which is what having a red document full of 'errors' implies in those sorts of situations. It's sometimes not a trivial distinction either, for example I've heard of cases where surprised British redditors have found themselves banned from American subreddits for being homophobic when they were actually talking innocently enough about cigarettes!
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    I would think a lot of mods, who are either Highly Online Americans or their weirdo equivalents in other countries, are well aware of the UK usage, but simply expect Brits to give it up in order to avoid offending Americans and the global Reddit community that largely takes American-style sensitivity as its orthodoxy. And considering that Reddit corporate feels that anything that could stir up such outrage is bad for business, mods of popular subreddits may well feel pressured to come down hard on these matters.
    - bluGill 3y ago
      It doesn't matter if you use UK or US spelling you are wrong. I wish we would adopt the international phonetic alphabet I might have a chance of spelling things correctly.
masklinn 3y ago
> English (USA), English (UK) > This deserves a separate discussion. I doubt many English speakers (let alone those who don't live in a particular anglophone country) care to distinguish between English dialects. While that is generally (though not always) true, I would assume it's really a stand in for the much more relevant zh locales. It is also rather relevant to es locales (america spanish has diverged quite a bit from europe spanish hence the creation of es-419), definitely french (canadian french, to a lesser extend belgian and swiss), and german (because swiss german). And it might be relevant for ko if north korea ever stops being what it is.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
lucideer 3y ago
As an Irish person, while we have en_IE which is great (and solves most of the problems you list re: Euro-centric defaults + English), I'd still quite like to have an even more broad / trans-language / "cosmopolitan" locale to use. I mainly type in English but occasionally other languages - I use a combination of Mac & Linux - macOS has an (off-by-default but enable-able) lang-changer icon in the tray that is handy enough, but still annoying to have to toggle. Linux is much worse. Mac also has quite a nice long-press-to-select-special character that at least makes for accessible (if not efficient) typing in multiple languages while using an English locale. Mobile keyboards pioneered this (& Android's current one even does simultanous multi-lang autocomplete, though it severely hurts accuracy). --- > I doubt many English speakers care to distinguish between English dialects. I think you'll find the opposite to be true. US English spellings & conventions are quite a departure from other dialects, so typing fluidly & naturally in any non-US dialect is going to net you a world of autocorrect pain in en_US. To the extent it renders many potentially essential spelling & grammar checkers completely unusable.
- l72 3y ago
  I write in multiple languages daily on Linux, including English, Russian, and Chinese. Switching keyboards (at least with gnome) is a simple super-space. While in my default (English) layout, it is easy enough to add in accents other characters using the compose key (right alt). So right-alt+'+a = á or right-alt+"+u = ü. I much prefer this over the long press as I can do it quickly and seamlessly without having to wait on feedback. Granted, it is not as discoverable, but once you are comfortable, it in my opinion is a better system.
  - denton-scratch 3y ago
    > So right-alt+'+a = á or right-alt+"+u = ü. Not for me! Right-alt+'+a = â Right-alt+'+u = û
- jdblair 3y ago
  I can 2nd this as an American who now resides in Europe. My first laptop I brought with me, and was defaulted to en_US, but my replacement is en_GB (Apple doesn't have en_NL, for good reason). I don't find it "unusable", though. I could change it back to en_US, but it has actually been interesting to see all of my American spellings flagged by autocorrect. Each time I write authorize instead of authorise it is an act of stubborn group affinity!
uxp8u61q 3y ago
> I have always been setting the locale to En-US even though I have never been to America. This leads to a number of annoyances though. E.g. LibreOffice always creates new documents for the Letter paper format and I have to switch it to A4 manually every time > I doubt many English speakers (let alone those who don't live in a particular anglophone country) care to distinguish between English dialects. To us presence of a huge number of these (don't forget en-AU, en-TT, en-ZW etc - there are more!) in the options lists brings only annoyance, especially when one chooses some non-US one and this opens another can of worms. Well, you just explained what this plethora of options is about. It's not just about how you spell flavor/flavour. It's a lot of different defaults for how you expect your OS to present information to you. Default paper size, but also how to write date and time, does the week start on Monday, Sunday, or something else, etc.
notatoad 3y ago
> I doubt many English speakers care to distinguish between English dialects I think you'd be surprised how many english (UK) people will get pissed off when their spell-checker starts removing the "u" from colour or flavour, or how many English (US) people get pissed off when the spellchecker starts suggesting random "u"s to words. additionally to that, locale isn't just about language. English (US) and English (UK) decides whether your dates get formatted DD-MM-YY or MM-DD-YY, whether your numbers have the thousands broken by commas or spaces, and a host of other localization considerations with a lot more significance than just the dialect of english.
- aksss 3y ago
  I worked for BP for a while (well, as a contracted coder) and I got quite used to the UK spell check correcting everything to its idiom. Everything seemed wrong once I returned a world that dismissed the value of the letter 'U' and preferred the letter 'Z' over 'S'. Also missed the normalizing of drinking beer at lunch.
  - denton-scratch 3y ago
    > Also missed the normalizing of drinking beer at lunch. Perhaps you're an old-timer? I worked in the city in the early 80s; lunch in the pub was routine, and sometimes required. By the end of the 80s, that was at best frowned on. Over the last 20 years, having alcohol on your breath after lunch would have been a disciplinary issue, unless you were entertaining a client, at least in the places I worked.
    - aksss 3y ago
      It's likely because I was in the exploration frontier of Alaska. This was late nineties, probably an operation run by people who worked in the city in the '80's and who could continue the old ways far away from the social glare of the head office. :D
- TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
  I'd really like an en-GB-oxendict (British English but favouring -ize over -ise) locale for formal writing.
dizhn 3y ago
i İ ı I I symphatize with people who get this wrong. (I just saw some YouTube video have a title TÜRKIYE in a segment) Even google keyboard can't seem to distinguish between I and İ. When I type "It", it suggests "İt's" which is quite pathetic.
__d 3y ago
I write daily in US English, Australian English, and Austrian German. Most of the time, a specific document is in one dialect/language or another: not mixed, although sometimes that's not true. I can understand that the conflation of spelling, word choices, time and date formatting, default paper sizes, measurement units, etc, etc, is convenient, and works a lot of the time, but it really doesn't work for me at all. That said, I appreciate that I occupy a very small niche.
lmm 3y ago
> I doubt many English speakers (let alone those who don't live in a particular anglophone country) care to distinguish between English dialects. Most people in the UK care - a population nearly twice that of California, and larger than the native speakers of any non-top-20 language. If you care enough to support e.g. Italian you should support en_UK.
ipsi 3y ago
> This deserves a separate discussion. I doubt many English speakers (let alone those who don't live in a particular anglophone country) care to distinguish between English dialects. To us presence of a huge number of these (don't forget en-AU, en-TT, en-ZW etc - there are more!) in the options lists brings only annoyance, especially when one chooses some non-US one and this opens another can of worms. I definitely do. The biggest difference, as everyone else, has pointed out is the US vs UK spellings. Realistically, though, beyond that country is a poor indicator for everything else. I want to use DD/MM/YYYY date format in English, but DD.MM.YYYY date format in German. I want to use $1,000 in English, but 1.000 $ in German. This isn't dependent on the country I live in, this is dependant on a combination of a country and language - that could be the country I'm living in, or the country I grew up in (mostly US date format vs not), and it's either the language I'm actively typing in, or the language of the document I'm reading, or the language I'm thinking in (but a computer can't exactly handle that). Trying to guess the correct combination is tricky, especially if a document is in two languages (e.g., a quotation), and users are lazy and won't switch their IME unless they have to. What this means in slightly more practical terms is that setting a single "locale" for my device doesn't make sense, but rather I should be able to choose a locale per language (or possibly spelling preferences by language and formatting options by language as separate choices). I'd then pick a language to use the device in, and it would use that languages locale, and tell apps that this language is the preferred language. If an app doesn't provide my preferred language, pull the preferred locale from settings for a language it does support, otherwise use the default set by developers. For some apps, it's a bit more complex, particularly if I'm creating content. GMail or Office would be two good examples, where the UI language might be in English, but the emails or documents are in German, or a combination of German and English. Even then, I'm sure there are people who need something even more flexible than that. At the moment, if I set my language to English but my Country to Germany on my iPhone, for example, things occasionally get confused. My UK banking app, for example, pulled the decimal separator from my locale settings for a while and then refused to work because "£9,79" (or whatever it was) isn't a valid amount of money, and I couldn't see a way to fix that without switching my Country in the phone settings. I imagine they fixed it by ignoring my configured locale and always using en-GB, thus defeating the whole point of a locale in the first place. So yeah, these days it's fairly common to not have a single "locale" that you work in - it's quite possible to want to use two or more but nothing is really set up to handle that well.
fomine3 3y ago
Unix style locale (set by env vars) is flexible, that can set per app. Android and iOS now support locale per app recently IIRC. Windows locale settings is global and some requires reboot.
grotorea 3y ago
> Practically, as "English-World" was not available in the past (and still wasn't available on platforms other than Windows the last time I checked), I have always been setting the locale to En-US even though I have never been to America. This leads to a number of annoyances though. E.g. LibreOffice always creates new documents for the Letter paper format and I have to switch it to A4 manually every time. It's even worse on Linux where locales appear to be less easy to customize than in Windows. Windows always offered a handy configuration dialog to granulatly tweak your locale choosing what measures system you prefer, whether your weeks begin on sundays or mondays and even define your preferred date-time format templates fully manually. There's the English (Denmark) locale for that on some platfoms.
- qwerty456127 3y ago
  Thank you very much, I'll give it a try.
  - grotorea 3y ago
    It's a bit of a joke that doesn't have universal support. Works on my phone. Apparently you can also try en_IE (Ireland). https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/62316/why-is-there-no-euro-english-locale https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/62316/why-is-there-...
  - actualwitch 3y ago
    en-GB is also a good choice
    - carstenhag 3y ago
      Not really, no € and no metric units
hahn-kev 3y ago
As much as I appreciate that I always wondered how many programs actually respect all those tweaks.

DoughnutHole 3y ago

> I doubt many English speakers care to distinguish between English dialects It's worthwhile purely for the sake of autocorrect/typo highlighting in text-editing software. I don't miss the days of spelling a word correctly in my version of English but still being stuck with the visual noise of red highlighting up and down the document because it doesn't conform to US English.

BoxOfRain 3y ago
Yeah I'd rather not have my British English dialect seen as second-class in a world of American English ideally which is what having a red document full of 'errors' implies in those sorts of situations. It's sometimes not a trivial distinction either, for example I've heard of cases where surprised British redditors have found themselves banned from American subreddits for being homophobic when they were actually talking innocently enough about cigarettes!
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  I would think a lot of mods, who are either Highly Online Americans or their weirdo equivalents in other countries, are well aware of the UK usage, but simply expect Brits to give it up in order to avoid offending Americans and the global Reddit community that largely takes American-style sensitivity as its orthodoxy. And considering that Reddit corporate feels that anything that could stir up such outrage is bad for business, mods of popular subreddits may well feel pressured to come down hard on these matters.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    It doesn't matter if you use UK or US spelling you are wrong. I wish we would adopt the international phonetic alphabet I might have a chance of spelling things correctly.

masklinn 3y ago

> English (USA), English (UK) > This deserves a separate discussion. I doubt many English speakers (let alone those who don't live in a particular anglophone country) care to distinguish between English dialects. While that is generally (though not always) true, I would assume it's really a stand in for the much more relevant zh locales. It is also rather relevant to es locales (america spanish has diverged quite a bit from europe spanish hence the creation of es-419), definitely french (canadian french, to a lesser extend belgian and swiss), and german (because swiss german). And it might be relevant for ko if north korea ever stops being what it is.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

lucideer 3y ago

As an Irish person, while we have en_IE which is great (and solves most of the problems you list re: Euro-centric defaults + English), I'd still quite like to have an even more broad / trans-language / "cosmopolitan" locale to use. I mainly type in English but occasionally other languages - I use a combination of Mac & Linux - macOS has an (off-by-default but enable-able) lang-changer icon in the tray that is handy enough, but still annoying to have to toggle. Linux is much worse. Mac also has quite a nice long-press-to-select-special character that at least makes for accessible (if not efficient) typing in multiple languages while using an English locale. Mobile keyboards pioneered this (& Android's current one even does simultanous multi-lang autocomplete, though it severely hurts accuracy). --- > I doubt many English speakers care to distinguish between English dialects. I think you'll find the opposite to be true. US English spellings & conventions are quite a departure from other dialects, so typing fluidly & naturally in any non-US dialect is going to net you a world of autocorrect pain in en_US. To the extent it renders many potentially essential spelling & grammar checkers completely unusable.

l72 3y ago
I write in multiple languages daily on Linux, including English, Russian, and Chinese. Switching keyboards (at least with gnome) is a simple super-space. While in my default (English) layout, it is easy enough to add in accents other characters using the compose key (right alt). So right-alt+'+a = á or right-alt+"+u = ü. I much prefer this over the long press as I can do it quickly and seamlessly without having to wait on feedback. Granted, it is not as discoverable, but once you are comfortable, it in my opinion is a better system.
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  > So right-alt+'+a = á or right-alt+"+u = ü. Not for me! Right-alt+'+a = â Right-alt+'+u = û
jdblair 3y ago
I can 2nd this as an American who now resides in Europe. My first laptop I brought with me, and was defaulted to en_US, but my replacement is en_GB (Apple doesn't have en_NL, for good reason). I don't find it "unusable", though. I could change it back to en_US, but it has actually been interesting to see all of my American spellings flagged by autocorrect. Each time I write authorize instead of authorise it is an act of stubborn group affinity!

uxp8u61q 3y ago

> I have always been setting the locale to En-US even though I have never been to America. This leads to a number of annoyances though. E.g. LibreOffice always creates new documents for the Letter paper format and I have to switch it to A4 manually every time > I doubt many English speakers (let alone those who don't live in a particular anglophone country) care to distinguish between English dialects. To us presence of a huge number of these (don't forget en-AU, en-TT, en-ZW etc - there are more!) in the options lists brings only annoyance, especially when one chooses some non-US one and this opens another can of worms. Well, you just explained what this plethora of options is about. It's not just about how you spell flavor/flavour. It's a lot of different defaults for how you expect your OS to present information to you. Default paper size, but also how to write date and time, does the week start on Monday, Sunday, or something else, etc.

notatoad 3y ago

> I doubt many English speakers care to distinguish between English dialects I think you'd be surprised how many english (UK) people will get pissed off when their spell-checker starts removing the "u" from colour or flavour, or how many English (US) people get pissed off when the spellchecker starts suggesting random "u"s to words. additionally to that, locale isn't just about language. English (US) and English (UK) decides whether your dates get formatted DD-MM-YY or MM-DD-YY, whether your numbers have the thousands broken by commas or spaces, and a host of other localization considerations with a lot more significance than just the dialect of english.

aksss 3y ago
I worked for BP for a while (well, as a contracted coder) and I got quite used to the UK spell check correcting everything to its idiom. Everything seemed wrong once I returned a world that dismissed the value of the letter 'U' and preferred the letter 'Z' over 'S'. Also missed the normalizing of drinking beer at lunch.
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  > Also missed the normalizing of drinking beer at lunch. Perhaps you're an old-timer? I worked in the city in the early 80s; lunch in the pub was routine, and sometimes required. By the end of the 80s, that was at best frowned on. Over the last 20 years, having alcohol on your breath after lunch would have been a disciplinary issue, unless you were entertaining a client, at least in the places I worked.
  - aksss 3y ago
    It's likely because I was in the exploration frontier of Alaska. This was late nineties, probably an operation run by people who worked in the city in the '80's and who could continue the old ways far away from the social glare of the head office. :D
TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
I'd really like an en-GB-oxendict (British English but favouring -ize over -ise) locale for formal writing.

dizhn 3y ago

i İ ı I I symphatize with people who get this wrong. (I just saw some YouTube video have a title TÜRKIYE in a segment) Even google keyboard can't seem to distinguish between I and İ. When I type "It", it suggests "İt's" which is quite pathetic.

__d 3y ago

I write daily in US English, Australian English, and Austrian German. Most of the time, a specific document is in one dialect/language or another: not mixed, although sometimes that's not true. I can understand that the conflation of spelling, word choices, time and date formatting, default paper sizes, measurement units, etc, etc, is convenient, and works a lot of the time, but it really doesn't work for me at all. That said, I appreciate that I occupy a very small niche.

lmm 3y ago

> I doubt many English speakers (let alone those who don't live in a particular anglophone country) care to distinguish between English dialects. Most people in the UK care - a population nearly twice that of California, and larger than the native speakers of any non-top-20 language. If you care enough to support e.g. Italian you should support en_UK.

ipsi 3y ago

> This deserves a separate discussion. I doubt many English speakers (let alone those who don't live in a particular anglophone country) care to distinguish between English dialects. To us presence of a huge number of these (don't forget en-AU, en-TT, en-ZW etc - there are more!) in the options lists brings only annoyance, especially when one chooses some non-US one and this opens another can of worms. I definitely do. The biggest difference, as everyone else, has pointed out is the US vs UK spellings. Realistically, though, beyond that country is a poor indicator for everything else. I want to use DD/MM/YYYY date format in English, but DD.MM.YYYY date format in German. I want to use $1,000 in English, but 1.000 $ in German. This isn't dependent on the country I live in, this is dependant on a combination of a country and language - that could be the country I'm living in, or the country I grew up in (mostly US date format vs not), and it's either the language I'm actively typing in, or the language of the document I'm reading, or the language I'm thinking in (but a computer can't exactly handle that). Trying to guess the correct combination is tricky, especially if a document is in two languages (e.g., a quotation), and users are lazy and won't switch their IME unless they have to. What this means in slightly more practical terms is that setting a single "locale" for my device doesn't make sense, but rather I should be able to choose a locale per language (or possibly spelling preferences by language and formatting options by language as separate choices). I'd then pick a language to use the device in, and it would use that languages locale, and tell apps that this language is the preferred language. If an app doesn't provide my preferred language, pull the preferred locale from settings for a language it does support, otherwise use the default set by developers. For some apps, it's a bit more complex, particularly if I'm creating content. GMail or Office would be two good examples, where the UI language might be in English, but the emails or documents are in German, or a combination of German and English. Even then, I'm sure there are people who need something even more flexible than that. At the moment, if I set my language to English but my Country to Germany on my iPhone, for example, things occasionally get confused. My UK banking app, for example, pulled the decimal separator from my locale settings for a while and then refused to work because "£9,79" (or whatever it was) isn't a valid amount of money, and I couldn't see a way to fix that without switching my Country in the phone settings. I imagine they fixed it by ignoring my configured locale and always using en-GB, thus defeating the whole point of a locale in the first place. So yeah, these days it's fairly common to not have a single "locale" that you work in - it's quite possible to want to use two or more but nothing is really set up to handle that well.

fomine3 3y ago

Unix style locale (set by env vars) is flexible, that can set per app. Android and iOS now support locale per app recently IIRC. Windows locale settings is global and some requires reboot.

grotorea 3y ago

> Practically, as "English-World" was not available in the past (and still wasn't available on platforms other than Windows the last time I checked), I have always been setting the locale to En-US even though I have never been to America. This leads to a number of annoyances though. E.g. LibreOffice always creates new documents for the Letter paper format and I have to switch it to A4 manually every time. It's even worse on Linux where locales appear to be less easy to customize than in Windows. Windows always offered a handy configuration dialog to granulatly tweak your locale choosing what measures system you prefer, whether your weeks begin on sundays or mondays and even define your preferred date-time format templates fully manually. There's the English (Denmark) locale for that on some platfoms.

qwerty456127 3y ago
Thank you very much, I'll give it a try.
- grotorea 3y ago
  It's a bit of a joke that doesn't have universal support. Works on my phone. Apparently you can also try en_IE (Ireland). https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/62316/why-is-there-no-euro-english-locale https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/62316/why-is-there-...
- actualwitch 3y ago
  en-GB is also a good choice
  - carstenhag 3y ago
    Not really, no € and no metric units

hahn-kev 3y ago

As much as I appreciate that I always wondered how many programs actually respect all those tweaks.