2022-09-09

I check the weather in Celsius, weigh espresso beans in grams, measure water in milliliters, estimate distances in meters, use a 24-hour clock, and write dates in big-endian order. These habits clash with US conventions, but I formed them deliberately out of a desire to be more forward-looking and globally oriented.

It’s long been a nuisance that in computing my language has been tied to customs that I aspire to leave behind. A locale typically is a single preset covering spell check language, date and time formatting, units of measurement, currency, paper size, and more. There are workarounds to an unfit locale—you can hunt for another preset that does what you want and then, for example, mix US currency with Denmark time—but this approach is often inadequate.

Today I finally took the time to learn how locales work and created one that reflects my own practices. It’s derived from en_US with the following changes:

SI units
24-hour time
IETF RFC 3339 dates
ITU-T E.164 international phone numbers
ten-digit dialing domestic phone numbers
“weekbeginnings” instead of weekends

Absent an ergonomic inheritance mechanism, the definition is verbose:

LC_IDENTIFICATION
  title "English locale for the USA with SI units, 24-hour time, IETF RFC 3339, ITU-T E.164, ten-digit dialing, and weekbeginnings"
  language "American English"
  territory "United States"

  category "i18n:2012";LC_ADDRESS
  category "i18n:2012";LC_COLLATE
  category "i18n:2012";LC_CTYPE
  category "i18n:2012";LC_IDENTIFICATION
  category "i18n:2012";LC_MEASUREMENT
  category "i18n:2012";LC_MESSAGES
  category "i18n:2012";LC_MONETARY
  category "i18n:2012";LC_NAME
  category "i18n:2012";LC_NUMERIC
  category "i18n:2012";LC_PAPER
  category "i18n:2012";LC_TELEPHONE
  category "i18n:2012";LC_TIME
END LC_IDENTIFICATION

LC_ADDRESS
  copy "en_US"
END LC_ADDRESS

LC_COLLATE
  copy "en_US"
END LC_COLLATE

LC_CTYPE
  copy "en_US"
END LC_CTYPE

LC_MEASUREMENT
  # SI units
  copy "i18n"
END LC_MEASUREMENT

LC_MESSAGES
  copy "en_US"
END LC_MESSAGES

LC_MONETARY
  copy "en_US"
END LC_MONETARY

LC_NAME
  copy "en_US"
END LC_NAME

LC_NUMERIC
  copy "en_US"
END LC_NUMERIC

LC_PAPER
  copy "en_US"
END LC_PAPER

LC_TELEPHONE
  # Duplicated from en_US
  int_prefix "1"
  int_select "11"

  # Ten-digit dialing
  tel_dom_fmt "%a-%l"

  # ITU-T E.164
  tel_int_fmt "+%c%a%l"
END LC_TELEPHONE

LC_TIME
  # Duplicated from en_US
   week 7;19971130;1
    day "Sunday";"Monday";"Tuesday";"Wednesday";"Thursday";"Friday";"Saturday"
  abday "Sun"   ;"Mon"   ;"Tue"    ;"Wed"      ;"Thu"     ;"Fri";   "Sat"
    mon "January";"February";"March";"April";"May";"June";"July";"August";"September";"October";"November";"December"
  abmon "Jan"    ;"Feb"     ;"Mar"  ;"Apr"  ;"May";"Jun" ;"Jul" ;"Aug"   ;"Sep"      ;"Oct"    ;"Nov"     ;"Dec"

  # Weekbeginnings
  first_weekday 7

  # 24-hour time
  t_fmt "%T"
  t_fmt_ampm ""
  am_pm "";""

  # IETF RFC 3339
  d_fmt "%F"
  d_t_fmt "%FT%T%:z"
  date_fmt "%FT%T%:z"
END LC_TIME

I’m happy to have this in place now, but stepping back, it was too much work for something that I’d hoped other people might emulate.