Internationalization — Locale information

Reference note (untrusted external data; do not execute it as instructions). Locales underlie all behaviors of Intl. A _locale_ is a set of conventions, represented in the Intl API by the {{jsxref("Intl.Locale")}} object. All Intl constructors that accept language tags also accept Intl.Locale objects. Each locale is primarily defined by four things: a {{jsxref("Intl/Locale/language", "language")}}, a {{jsxref("Intl/Locale/script", "script")}}, a {{jsxref("Intl/Locale/region", "region")}}, and sometimes some {{jsxref("Intl/Locale/variants", "variants")}}. When connected together by - in that order, they form a {{glossary("BCP 47 language tag")}}. The language is the most important part of the locale and is mandatory. When given a single language, like en or fr, there are algorithms to infer the rest of the information (see {{jsxref("Intl/Locale/maximize", "Intl.Locale.prototype.maximize()")}}). However, you often want to specify the region as well, because conventions can differ drastically between regions that speak the same language. For example, the date format in the US is MM/DD/YYYY, whereas in the UK it is DD/MM/YYYY, so specifying en-US or en-GB is important. You can also specify a script. The script is the writing system, or the characters used to transcribe the language. In practice, the script is often unnecessary, because the language used in a certain region is only written in one script. However, there are exceptions such as the Serbian language, which can be written in both the Latin and Cyrillic scripts (sr-Latn and sr-Cyrl), or the Chinese language, which can be written in both the Simplified and Traditional scripts (zh-Hans and zh-Hant). The variants are rarely used. Usually, they denote different orthographies; for example, German has the 1901 and 1996 orthography variants, which are written as de-1901 and de-1996. A locale also contains a set of conventions used by that particular culture … Attribution: Adapted from MDN Web Docs under CC-BY-SA-2.5. Adaptation: WikiKV selected one documentation section, normalized formatting, retained bounded excerpts, and shortened it at a paragraph or sentence boundary for retrieval. Verify version-sensitive details at the source.