Locale Identifiers (Compact 2013)

3/28/2014

A locale identifier is a standard international numeric abbreviation, that can uniquely identify one of the installed system-defined locales.

LCID Format

Each locale has a unique locale identifier (LCID), which is a 32-bit value that consists of a language identifier and a sort identifier. The LCID is constructed using the MAKELCID macro. The following illustration shows the format of the bits in an LCID.

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

Locale information is always stored and manipulated as a null-terminated string. No binary data is allowed; any numeric values must be specified as text. Each type of information has a particular format. In addition, several of the types are linked together, so that changing one changes the value of the other as well.

Although a specified locale identifier may be supported, it is not available for use by an application unless it is also installed.

The following locale identifiers are predefined:

• LOCALE_SYSTEM_DEFAULT, which identifies the system default locale.
• LOCALE_USER_DEFAULT, which identifies the locale of the current user.
• LOCALE_NEUTRAL, which identifies the default language-neutral locale.

The LOCALE_NEUTRAL identifier is the same as LOCALE_USER_DEFAULT. An application can retrieve the current locale identifiers by using the GetSystemDefaultLCID and GetUserDefaultLCID functions.

Language ID Format

A language identifier is a standard international numeric abbreviation for a country/region. Each language has a unique language identifier (LANGID), which is a 16-bit value that consists of a primary language identifier and a secondary language identifier. The LANGID is constructed using the MAKELANGID macro. The following illustration shows the format of the bits in a LANGID.

+-------------------------+-------------------------+
|  Secondary Language ID  |   Primary Language ID   |
+-------------------------+-------------------------+
15                    10  9                         0   bit

The following language identifiers are predefined:

• LANG_SYSTEM_DEFAULT, which identifies the system default language.
• LANG_USER_DEFAULT, which identifies the language of the current user.

Requirements

See Also

Reference

National/Regional Language Support (NLS) Constants
Language Identifiers