A locale is a combination of several things, including a language, but not only.
E.g. I'm from portugal. I'm visiting an american site, which does not have professional portuguese translations, but does have auto-generated ones.
I don't like the auto-generated ones and can read english just fine, so I want to have the language set to english (en-US in this case).
However, I still want it to apply some locale-specific things from Portugal, e.g.:
- Units (Metric vs. Imperial vs. Whatever mess countries like the UK do)
- Date formatting (DD/MM/YYYY vs MM/DD/YYYY)
- Time formatting (AM/PM vs. 24hr clock)
- Currency formatting (10€ vs. 10 € vs. 10 EUR vs. €10)
- Number formatting (10,000.00 vs 10.000,00)
- When the week starts (Monday vs. Sunday)
If you take a look at the windows locale options, it mostly lets you mix-and-match whatever you want (which is great! Now if only the MS apps let me stop using the localized keyboard shortcuts...): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/globalization/locale/langu...
Locale I'm using as a shorthand for "the bundle of variables that your service or business needs to tweak between customers in different markets". It may determine things like currency, date/time or currency formatting, or relevant regulatory framework. My argument is that language should always be sett-able independently of the other variables locale controls.
For an example of a site that almost gets it right, see https://www.finnair.com/ . You are first prompted to set location, and then language. I say "almost" because although they will allow you to select English in any market, they won't allow you to select any offered language in any market.
In comparison, https://www.flysas.com/ you get one dropdown which sets market, currency, and language in one go.
E.g. I'm from portugal. I'm visiting an american site, which does not have professional portuguese translations, but does have auto-generated ones.
I don't like the auto-generated ones and can read english just fine, so I want to have the language set to english (en-US in this case).
However, I still want it to apply some locale-specific things from Portugal, e.g.:
- Units (Metric vs. Imperial vs. Whatever mess countries like the UK do)
- Date formatting (DD/MM/YYYY vs MM/DD/YYYY)
- Time formatting (AM/PM vs. 24hr clock)
- Currency formatting (10€ vs. 10 € vs. 10 EUR vs. €10)
- Number formatting (10,000.00 vs 10.000,00)
- When the week starts (Monday vs. Sunday)
If you take a look at the windows locale options, it mostly lets you mix-and-match whatever you want (which is great! Now if only the MS apps let me stop using the localized keyboard shortcuts...): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/globalization/locale/langu...