It doesn't actually change the charset, it changes the behaviour of a few libc functions and other things that use it (like perl). Sane programs ignore libc loc

It doesn't actually change the charset, it changes the behaviour of a few libc functions and other things that use it (like perl). Sane programs ignore libc locales, as you do not want the behaviour of your program changing randomly based on some environment variables, that way madness lies.