I used to use the somewhat whimsical en_DK.UTF-8 locale when installing a new system because that would produce (roughly) the locale results I wanted, even though I am not in Denmark.
- Measurements metric
- Sensible date and time formats, but day and month names in English
- 24-hour time format
- Work week starts on Monday
- Numeric date in (something at least resembling) ISO format, yyyy-mm-dd
- Informal date is dd/mm, not the other way around
- A4 paper size
- Euro currency
- System messages in English
Alas, Ubuntu and Debian no longer seem to support the en_DK locale. I have been thinking there should be something like en_EU for "Euro English".
Every place I have worked has had this sort of requirement — the official language of the organization is English, but we want continental European defaults for everything else.
I am imagining I am not the first person to think that a "location agnostic" English locale would benefit both me personally and the organizations I work for. So why does it not exist, and where do I look for further discussions and rationale?
… Or should I go ahead and propose it? To whom?
Best Answer
(a) An entity known as the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository seems to be the place that handles locales. The glibc wiki indicates that they will follow CLDR.
(b) They have a locale known as "en_150" which seems to be intended to do what you want. I'm not sure glibc has implemented it yet. There's also a similar locale known as en_BE which is identical to en_150 except that it has regional coverage of BE rather than worldwide.