12.8 Locales

A locale defines cultural conventions for a particular language and region of the world (see Locales in The GNU C Library Reference Manual). Each locale has a name that typically has the form language_territory.codeset—e.g., fr_LU.utf8 designates the locale for the French language, with cultural conventions from Luxembourg, and using the UTF-8 encoding.

Usually, you will want to specify the default locale for the machine using the locale field of the operating-system declaration (see locale).

The selected locale is automatically added to the locale definitions known to the system if needed, with its codeset inferred from its name—e.g., bo_CN.utf8 will be assumed to use the UTF-8 codeset. Additional locale definitions can be specified in the locale-definitions slot of operating-system—this is useful, for instance, if the codeset could not be inferred from the locale name. The default set of locale definitions includes some widely used locales, but not all the available locales, in order to save space.

For instance, to add the North Frisian locale for Germany, the value of that field may be:

(cons (locale-definition
        (name "fy_DE.utf8") (source "fy_DE"))
      %default-locale-definitions)

Likewise, to save space, one might want locale-definitions to list only the locales that are actually used, as in:

(list (locale-definition
        (name "ja_JP.eucjp") (source "ja_JP")
        (charset "EUC-JP")))

The compiled locale definitions are available at /run/current-system/locale/X.Y, where X.Y is the libc version, which is the default location where the GNU libc provided by Guix looks for locale data. This can be overridden using the LOCPATH environment variable (see LOCPATH and locale packages).

The locale-definition form is provided by the (gnu system locale) module. Details are given below.

Data Type: locale-definition

This is the data type of a locale definition.

name

The name of the locale. See Locale Names in The GNU C Library Reference Manual, for more information on locale names.

source

The name of the source for that locale. This is typically the language_territory part of the locale name.

charset (default: "UTF-8")

The “character set” or “code set” for that locale, as defined by IANA.

Scheme Variable: %default-locale-definitions

A list of commonly used UTF-8 locales, used as the default value of the locale-definitions field of operating-system declarations.

These locale definitions use the normalized codeset for the part that follows the dot in the name (see normalized codeset in The GNU C Library Reference Manual). So for instance it has uk_UA.utf8 but not, say, uk_UA.UTF-8.

• Locale Data Compatibility Considerations

(use-package-modules base)

(operating-system
  ;; …
  (locale-libcs (list glibc-2.21 (canonical-package glibc))))