N Oracle function to check for valid Japanese characters (Non-ASCII)

I am a little doubtful that this is exactly what you are looking for, but

host echo %nls_lang%;

ENGLISH_UNITED KINGDOM.WE8ISO8859P1

shows the client nls_lang environment variable on the client.

I don't think there will be a SQL query you can run to give the 'current' setting because AFAIK the server is not aware of what translation is done client-side, so any command to show the current setting will have to be native to the client - I used SQL Developer for the above command, but I assume it will work the same in SQL*Plus

--edit

from AskTom:

only the client knows their character set as well -- it is not available "in the database"

and

the character set describes what is stored in database.

the client makes their desired translated to character know [sic] to the database via the NLS_LANG settting.

If you were on 11.1+, you might have some joy with v$session_connect_info, because:

This information is pushed by OCI to the server ats login time.

But I discovered it would still depend on how you are connecting, eg from the JDBC Thin Driver you aren't using OCI and so the information isn't pushed

If the sort order that you want to specify is already supported by Oracle, you can do this by ordering by the NLSSORT function - like so:

ORDER BY NLSSORT(sorted_column, 'NLS_SORT = XDanish') -- Replace XDanish as appropriate

You can find a list of supported sort orders here.