A language is a natural language, such as English, French, and Japanese. A sublanguange 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 language identifiers , 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 specified 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.