Norbert’s Corner

New Supported Locales

June 23, 2005

If you pay close attention to the return values of the getAvailableLocales methods in the java.text and java.util packages, you may have noticed that the lists got a little longer in recent builds of JDK 6. The additions to the already long list of supported locales in JRE 5.0 are:

Language Country Locale ID
Chinese (Simplified) Singapore zh_SG
English Malta en_MT
English Philippines en_PH
English Singapore en_SG
Greek Cyprus el_CY
Indonesian Indonesia in_ID
Japanese (Japanese calendar) Japan ja_JP_JP
Malay Malaysia ms_MY
Maltese Malta mt_MT
Spanish US es_US

You may wonder how we picked these locales. OK:

The additions mark the first time that we use data from the Common Locale Data Repository for the JRE. The CLDR is maintained by the Unicode Consortium with contributions from IBM, Apple, Sun, and many others. We intend to continue to use CLDR for new locale data in the JRE. It’s an open question whether we should also update existing data from this source – it might fix some problems in our data and improve the alignment between the JRE and other software products, but it may also be seen as an unnecessary incompatibility. It’s pretty common for locale data to have two or more different versions that are all acceptable to users, while random changes between these versions are not acceptable. If you have an opinion on this issue, please let us know.