At any time, a C program has a current locale: a collection of information that describes the conventions appropriate to some nationality, culture, and language. Locales have names that are strings. The only two standardized locale names are "C" and "". Each program begins in the "C" locale, which causes all library functions to behave just as they have historically. The "" locale is the implementation’s best guess at the correct set of conventions appropriate to the program’s invocation. "C" and "" can cause identical behavior. Other locales may be provided by implementations.
For the purposes of practicality and expediency, locales are partitioned into a set of categories. A program can change the complete locale, or just one or more categories. Generally, each category affects a set of functions disjoint from the functions affected by other categories, so temporarily changing one category for a limited duration can make sense.