Linux: Define Locale and Language Settings

Locales are used in Linux to define which language and character set (encoding) user see in the terminal.

From this article you will learn how to check and change the current locale and language settings from the command line in Linux.

I will show how to check the current locale and language settings and how to get the list of available locals.

You will also see how to set locale and language temporary for the current session only as well as permanently for a single user or for the all users (change default system locale).

Cool Tip: Determine and change a file’s character encoding from the command line in Linux! The best solution for converting text files between different charsets! Read more →

Locale and Language Settings

Execute locale command to get the information about the current locale and language settings:

$ locale

To list all enabled locales, run:

$ locale -a

Locale is defined in the following format:

<LANGUAGE>_<TERRITORY>.<CODESET>[@<MODIFIERS>]

LANGUAGE	ISO 639 language code
TERRITORY	ISO 3166 country code
CODESET	Character set or encoding identifier, like ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8

e.g. Australian English with UTF-8 encoding is defined as: en_AU.UTF-8

Add New Locale

New locale: Before a locale can be enabled on the system, it must be generated.

If you didn’t find the desired language or encoding in the list of enabled locales, you can search for them in the list of all supported locales and install whatever you need.

Ubuntu-18.04

Supported releases: Ubuntu-15.04, 15.10, 16.04, 16.10, 18.04.

List the all supported (available for generation) locales:

$ cat /etc/locale.gen

Find the desired locale, for example:

$ grep de_DE.UTF-8 /etc/locale.gen
de_DE.UTF-8 UTF-8

Generate it with:

$ sudo locale-gen de_DE.UTF-8

Now you should see it in the list of available locales:

$ locale -a | grep de_DE.utf8
de_DE.utf8

Ubuntu-14.04

Supported releases: Ubuntu-9.10, 10.04, 10.10, 11.04, 11.10, 12.04, 12.10, 13.04, 13.10, 14.04, 14.10.

List the all supported (available for generation) locales:

$ cat /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED

Find the desired locale, for example:

$ grep fr_FR.UTF-8 /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED
fr_FR.UTF-8 UTF-8

Generate it with:

$ sudo locale-gen fr_FR.UTF-8

Now you should see it in the list of available locales:

$ locale -a | grep fr_FR.utf8
fr_FR.utf8

CentOS-7, CentOS-6

List the all supported (available for generation) locales:

$ localedef --list-archive

Find the desired locale, for example:

localedef --list-archive | grep hi_IN.utf8
hi_IN.utf8

Generate it with:

$ sudo localedef -c -i hi_IN -f UTF-8 hi_IN.UTF-8

Now you should see it in the list of available locales:

$ locale -a | grep hi_IN.utf8
hi_IN.utf8

Set Locale for the Current Session

The locale and language settings are defined in the LANG variable that you can see if you run echo $LANG.

To set the required locale and language for the current session – it is just needed to redefine this variable.

Below you will find the examples of setting locales for some popular languages.

Set the environment variable LANG, as shown in the examples, to change a language and encoding for the current session:

Set the English locale:

$ LANG=en_US.utf8

Set the Russian locale:

$ LANG=ru_RU.utf8

Set the French locale:

$ LANG=fr_FR.iso-8859-15

Set the German locale:

$ LANG=de_DE.utf8

Set the Hindi locale:

$ LANG=hi_IN.utf8

Define Locale and Language Permanently

If you don’t want to change locale manually for the each session – you can set it permanently.

For this you can set the required value of the LANG variable in a user’s bash profile and the needed locale and language settings will be automatically loaded upon the each session.

Put the following line to the ~/.bashrc or ~/.profile files, to change permanently the locale of the current user to en_US.utf8:

export LANG=en_US.utf8

By default, the modification will take effect after logout/login, but you can force it if you run one of the below commands, depending on in which file you have defined the LANG variable:

$ source ~/.profile

– or –

$ source ~/.bashrc

Set Default System Locale

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Perform the following steps to permanently change the system locale (for the all users).

Ubuntu-18.04

Supported releases: Ubuntu-15.04, 15.10, 16.04, 16.10, 18.04.

$ localectl set-locale LANG=en_US.utf8

Ubuntu-14.04

Supported releases: Ubuntu-9.10, 10.04, 10.10, 11.04, 11.10, 12.04, 12.10, 13.04, 13.10, 14.04, 14.10.

Edit the file with default locale settings:

/etc/default/locale

Set the LANG variable:

LANG="en_US.utf8"

CentOS-7

$ localectl set-locale LANG=en_US.utf8

CentOS-6

Edit the file with default locale settings:

/etc/sysconfig/i18n

Set the LANG variable:

LANG="en_US.utf8"

Reboot is required: Note that the above settings will take effect after reboot only.