The collation order provides language and cultural-specific information about how the characters of a given language are to be sorted. It identifies things like the sequence of the letters in the alphabet, how to compare letters with accents with letters without accents, and if there are any characters that can be ignored when comparing strings. The collation order also takes into account culture-specific information about a language such as the direction in which it is read (left to right, right to left, or up and down). The directory server uses the collation orders to perform searches on internationalized directory data.

The character type distinguishes alphabetic characters from numeric or other characters. In addition, it defines the mapping of upper-case to lower-case letters. For example, in some languages, the | character is considered punctuation while in others it is considered alphabetic.

The monetary format specifies the monetary symbol used by a specific region, whether the symbol goes before or after its value, and how monetary units are represented.

The time and date format indicates the customary formatting for times and dates in the region. The time/date format indicates such things as whether dates are customarily represented in the mm/dd/yy, month day, year, or dd/mm/yy format and specifies what the days of the week and month are in a given language. For example, the date January 10, 1996 is represented as 10.leden 1996 in Czechoslovakian and 10 janvier 1996 in French.