The differences are significant to users in those language groups. For example, the French, English, and Japanese locales display date and time values differently. The names of configurations and locales are usually the same.
Locales are standard operating system features.
They have standard three-letter names, such as enu, jpn, and frn, for U.S. English, Japanese, and French. When you create a custom configuration that does not have the same name as its locale, you map the custom configuration to the appropriate locale to enable the appropriate functionality. On an NT system, you create a new registry key. On a UNIX system, you set an environment variable.