Languages, Locales, and Keyboard Layouts

Languages, Locales, and Keyboard Layouts

Here are explanations of some of the Windows terminology relating to language and keyboard support. This material is acknowledged as Microsoft's, though I have corrected their spelling mistakes.

A language is a natural language, such as English, French, and Japanese. A sublanguage is a variant of a natural language that is spoken in a specific geographical region, such as the English sublanguages spoken in Great Britain and the United States. Win32-based applications use values, called locales, to uniquely identify languages and sublanguages. Applications typically use locales to set the language in which input and output is processed. Setting the locale for the keyboard, for example, affects the character values generated by the keyboard. Setting the locale for the display or printer affects the glyphs displayed or printed. Applications set the locale for a keyboard by loading and using keyboard layouts. They set the locale for a display or printer by selecting a font that supports the given locale.

A keyboard layout not only specifies the physical position of the keys on the keyboard but also determines the character values generated by pressing those keys. Each layout has an associated locale which identifies the current input language and determines which character values are generated by which keys and key combinations.

In general, a Windows user can associate any input language with a given physical layout. For example, an English-speaking user who very occasionally works in French can set the input language of the keyboard to French without changing the physical layout of the keyboard. This means the user can enter text in French using the familiar English layout.