Determining PeopleSoft and ISO Codes for Your Language
The PeopleSoft system does not currently use the ISO standard language and locale identifiers in PeopleTools. Instead, PeopleTools uses a proprietary three-letter language code that is determined and maintained by PeopleSoft developers. When adding a new language, you must choose a three-letter language code to represent the name of your language.
Because this code is used to key several PeopleTools database objects and the PeopleTools cache file, ensure that the language code contains only three uppercase US-ASCII letters—no numbers, spaces, or accented characters.
This table lists the PeopleSoft language codes that are allocated:
| Code | Language |
|---|---|
|
ARA |
Arabic |
|
BUL |
Bulgarian |
|
CFR |
Canadian French |
|
CRO |
Croatian |
|
CZE |
Czech |
|
DAN |
Danish |
|
DUT |
Dutch |
|
ENG |
English |
|
ESP |
Spanish |
|
FIN |
Finnish |
|
FRA |
French |
|
GER |
German |
|
GRK |
Greek |
|
HEB |
Hebrew |
|
HUN |
Hungarian |
|
JPN |
Japanese |
|
KOR |
Korean |
|
MAY |
Malay |
|
NOR |
Norwegian (Bokmål) |
|
POL |
Polish |
|
POR |
Portuguese |
|
ROM |
Romanian |
|
RUS |
Russian |
|
SER |
Serbian |
|
SLK |
Slovak |
|
SLV |
Slovenian |
|
SVE |
Swedish |
|
THA |
Thai |
|
TUR |
Turkish |
|
UKE |
UK English |
|
ZHT |
Traditional Chinese |
|
ZHS |
Simplified Chinese |
As an example, we will chose QUE for Quechua (the QUE code is derived from the language) as our additional language.
Once you have chosen a three-letter code for your new language, you must determine which ISO locale corresponds to that language. ISO locales are comprised of two components, a language identifier and a territory identifier, separated by an underscore or a hyphen. Typically, the language component is in lowercase letters, and the territory identifier is in uppercase letters. For example, en_US is the ISO locale for U.S. English, and de_CH is the ISO locale for Swiss German.
The language component of the locale is the two-letter language code defined by the ISO 639 standard. The territory component of the locale is the two-letter country code defined by the ISO 3166 standard.
The territory portion of the ISO locale can be omitted if you want to indicate only a language and not a country-specific derivation of that language. In our example, we plan to add the Quechua language, so the appropriate ISO locale is qu. If we were adding a specific dialect of Quechua, we would use a specific ISO locale, such as qu_QU. But as long as we're adding the generic Quechua language, we can use qu as the complete ISO locale code.
In most situations, you can use only the language portion of the ISO locale. However, the two-component locale is important if you are planning to add derivations of existing languages, such as Mexican Spanish (es_MX) or Australian English (en_AU). You can easily create those language derivations from a related language using the PeopleTools Terminology Management tool.