Wishlist: provide the English/EU locale

Feedback Feature Request
1

I think that the English/EU (English/European Union) locale has been standardized (ICU Locale “English (Europe)” (en_150)).

This is a great locale for those in Europe that need to have their machines set on English, e.g. because of a multilingual working environment where people of different nationalities need to cooperate and English is a lingua franca.

This locale is different from English/US and English/UK because of how dates are written, the 24 hours clock, the A4 paper, the currency sign (among other things). As of today a very close approximation is En/IE, however it would be more natural to use En/EU (aka EN_150) if available.

2

The locale options are defined in glibc, which is developed by the GNU Project, and Manjaro imports glibc directly from Arch. Therefore, there is nothing that Manjaro proper can do about the availability of locales. :man_shrugging:

But by the way, the UK locale does already feature a 24-hour clock, A1/A2/A3/A4/… paper sizes and the metric system, and so does the Australian locale. All you need to do is enable multiple localization options and tailor-pick what you want to use from either locale.

These below are my settings — I reside in the Flanders, Belgium, but I use US English as my language… :arrow_down:

[nx-74205:/dev/pts/3][/home/aragorn]
[aragorn] >  locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC=en_US.UTF-8
LC_TIME=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE=nl_BE.UTF-8
LC_MONETARY=nl_BE.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER=nl_BE.UTF-8
LC_NAME=nl_BE.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=nl_BE.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=nl_BE.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=nl_BE.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=nl_BE.UTF-8
LC_ALL=
2 Likes
3

The only difference I can see between that and en_GB is the currency, ¤ instead of £, and XXX instead of GPB.

Are those placeholders or the actual values used? They seem terrible as currency symbols.

Also “am” and “pm” are “AM” and “PM” in EU. I can’t see any paper sizes but it wouldn’t surprise me if they’re the same.

1 Like
4

The Euro symbol € is UTF-8, and the written-out currency code is EUR. But all of that is already available as-is in all of the European locales in glibc. :wink:

1 Like
5

In fact, as mentioned, en_IE is currently the best pick for the proposed requirements, rather than the UK one. Also noticed that there is a weird en_DK which is quite European. Furthermore, it is certainly possible to mix and match as you suggest (even if some apps happen to get confused by this since they do not read all the localization options and base their decisions only on a few of them).

Funny fact, I have just read that “The en_DK locale doesn’t really have anything to do with Denmark except for its name. It was originally created by someone who wanted the same thing as requested here - a reasonable set of defaults for an English speaker in Europe. The name “en_DK” is sort of a joke - all locale names at that time were composed of a language code and a country code (there were no continent codes or anything else in the second position), and for whatever reason Denmark was chosen as the placeholder country code”. Don’t know how much truth is in there, though.

More seriously, thought the locales were pluggable into libc rather than defined in glibc in a fixed way because of the install instructions in https://github.com/PanderMusubi/locale-en-nl. So hoped that downstreams of glibc could do something. Sorry for the noise.