Full and Partial Locales

A full Solaris locale has all of the listed functions and the localized system messages in that language. The German de locale is a full locale. A German language user sees all system messages in German.

Partial locales have the listed functions but they don't provide localized messages. For example, the Russian ru locale can process input, output, sorting, and so on, but it does not have localized messages in Russian. For this reason it is a partial locale.

Some partial locales do use non-English messages because there may be a full locale with the localized messages. For example, the de_AT is a partial locale for Austria. Austrians speaks German but use a different currency. The Austrian locale is a subset of the German de locale. It displays messages in German and currency in Austrian shillings instead of German marks.