Each locale has a unique identifier, a 32-bit value that consists of a language identifier and a sort order identifier. The locale identifier is a standard international numeric abbreviation and has the components necessary to uniquely identify one of the installed operating system-defined locales. For details of locale identifiers, see Locale Identifier Constants and Strings.

The following illustration shows the format of the bits in a locale identifier.

+-------------+---------+-------------------------+
|   Reserved  | Sort ID |      Language ID        |
+-------------+---------+-------------------------+
31         20 19     16 15                      0   bit

Your application can construct a locale identifier using the MAKELCID macro. Alternatively it can use one of the predefined identifiers listed below..

• LOCALE_INVARIANT
• LOCALE_SYSTEM_DEFAULT
• LOCALE_USER_DEFAULT

Windows Vista and later: The following custom locale identifiers are also supported.

• LOCALE_CUSTOM_DEFAULT
• LOCALE_CUSTOM_UI_DEFAULT
• LOCALE_CUSTOM_UNSPECIFIED

An application can retrieve the current locale identifiers by using the GetSystemDefaultLCID and GetUserDefaultLCID functions. Each thread can set and retrieve its own locale with SetThreadLocale and GetThreadLocale.

Related Topics

Locales and Languages, Locale Names