$LANG
environment variable stores the locale, language and character set. $LANG
is ll_TT.CCCC[@Modifiers]
. ll
is a two letter abbreviation (ISO 639) of the language, TT
a two letter abbreviation ISA 3166 for the territory and CCCC
the characters set. So, in order to define a locale for the german part of Switzerland, one might use export LANG=de_CH.UTF8
$ locale
sort
. /etc/default/locale
is the file where global locale setings are stored. /usr/share/i18n/locales
is the default path for locale definition files.