About
A locale 1) refers to a national language and the region in which the language is spoken.
Generally a locale identifier consists of at least:
- and a region identifier.
Any special variant preferences can be added.
Example - English language in the US country
en-US
Usage
Character Set
It will be used by application to choose the character set used to encode string.
Data Type rendering
Render or parse data type with the appropriate locale formatting, such as using the correct:
- and/or number formats.
Content Translation
The locale is the key parameter that permits to localize an application .
Metadata
Search Engine are also using this information set in web meta to localize the content.
Unicode Data
See the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository. For instance, for the data: http://www.unicode.org/Public/cldr/27.0.1/
List and Specification
You can find the Language Tags and Locale Identifiers for the World Wide Web on this page.