/etc/locale.gen contains the locale definitions and system languages. # is treated as a locale definition to be built by the shell script /usr/bin/locale-gen. This script reads locale.gen and invokes localedef for the chosen localisation profiles and places the generated locales in /usr/lib/locale. <locale-name> <charset>, for example en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8 de_CH.UTF-8 UTF-8