The type of information a locale can contain and the interfaces that use a locale are subject to standardization. However, where locales reside on the system and how they are named can vary from one vendor to another. Locales do not solve all of the problems that localization must address. The mnemonic L10N is frequently used as an abbreviation for localization. The ordering of characters may be implicit in underlying hardware but can be defined for software to conform to the way language is used in a particular territory.
Many languages have more complex rules for sorting than English.
In Spanish, for example, the character combination ch sorts between the characters c and d . A single character can be equivalent to a combined set of characters. Accented letters do not always follow unaccented letters. In many languages, this is true only if the words that contain those letters are otherwise identical. In other languages, a particular accented letter may be considered unique and sort after a letter that is different from the unaccented counterpart.