About Locale

Locale is a combination of geography, language, and culture. To understand Locale, consider the difference between the Unites States and the United Kingdom. Both share a common language, but they use completely different units of measure. The United States uses the English language, but use miles, degrees Fahrenheit, and gallons, while the United Kingdom uses kilometers, degrees Celsius, and liters.

Other examples include parts of Belgium and France that use French as a national language, but they have different dialects. For example, ninety is quatre-vingts dix in French, but nonante in Belgium.

Locale also covers punctuation. North Americans, for example, use a comma to separate the digits in a large number (1,000,000 being one million), while central European countries use a period (1.000.000 being the same million in central Europe) and Switzerland uses an apostrophe for the same million: 1'000'000.

Oracle provides seed data that reflects the common locales, but it is important that each locale in which you will have users is double-checked for accuracy.