Multiple environments exist within the Solaris operating system for support of different national languages. Each of these national environments is called a locale, which considers the language, its characters, fonts, and the customs used to input and format data.
A locale defines the behavior of a program at run time according to the language and cultural conventions of a user's geographical area. Throughout the system, locales affect the following:
Encoding and processing of text data
Identifying the language and encoding of resource files and their text values
Rendering and layout of text strings
Interchanging text that is used for interclient text communication
Encoding and decoding for interclient text communication
Selecting the input method (that is, which codeset is generated) and the processing of text data
Font and icon files that are culturally specific
Actions and file types
User Interface Definition (UID) files
Date and time formats
Numeric formats
Monetary formats
Collation order
Format for informative and diagnostic messages and interactive responses