--- title: "Locale meaning: locale vs language, with tag examples" description: "A locale is a language plus the regional conventions that go with it, written as a tag such as de or de-AT. How locales differ from languages and how tags work." url: "https://www.langrelay.com/glossary/locale" --- 1. [Home](https://www.langrelay.com/) 2. [Glossary](https://www.langrelay.com/glossary) 3. Locale GlossaryLocalization # Locale A locale is a language plus the regional conventions that go with it, written as a tag such as de or de-AT. How locales differ from languages and how tags work. [Chris Jayden](https://www.langrelay.com/about) Founder Published 7 October 2026 Reading time 2 min read ![A monk and a trekker climb stone steps to a cliffside monastery whose great door is decorated with green and orange leaf tiles.](https://www.langrelay.com/_emdash/api/media/file/01M4ETBQ90RDV4M2R76QF1SNSE.webp) On this page 1. Locale vs language 2. How a locale is written 3. How LangRelay identifies a Target locale A locale is a language together with the place-specific conventions a reader expects: spelling, vocabulary, date and number formats, currency. "German" is a language. German as written in Austria, where January is Jänner, is a locale. Software and websites use locales because the language alone does not tell them how to write a date or which word to use. ## Locale vs language Every locale has a language, but one language can have many locales. Spanish is one language; Spanish for Spain, for Mexico and for Argentina are three locales with different words and, in Argentina, a different informal pronoun. Their number formats differ too: the browser's locale data writes 12.345,6 for Spain and Argentina and 12,345.6 for Mexico. A locale can also carry a script, which is how Chinese in Traditional characters is told apart from Chinese in Simplified ones. The distinction matters when one version of a page has to serve many countries. A site with a single French version uses a language. A site with separate pages for France and Quebec, each with its own prices and vocabulary, uses locales. ## How a locale is written On the web, a locale is written as a BCP 47 language tag, defined in RFC 5646. The tag starts with a language subtag and can add a script and a region: - `fr` is French, with no region. - `de-AT` is German as used in Austria. - `zh-Hant` is Chinese written in the Traditional script. - `es-419` is Spanish for Latin America and the Caribbean, using a UN region number. Tags are not case sensitive, but the convention is a lowercase language and an uppercase region. Other systems write the same idea differently: WordPress names its translation files with locales such as `de_DE`, with an underscore. Search engines are stricter than the standard. Google's hreflang accepts ISO 639-1 language codes and ISO 3166-1 two-letter regions only, so `es-419` is a valid tag that Google's hreflang does not support. ## How LangRelay identifies a Target locale In LangRelay, each language you translate a Site into is a Target locale, and its only identity is a canonical BCP 47 tag from a curated list. Everything else is derived from that tag and cannot be edited separately: - The URL prefix is the tag in lower case: `/de/`, or `/de-at/` for a regional locale. - The hreflang value and the page's `html lang` are the tag itself. - The variety the translation engine is asked for comes from the tag. A bare tag means its Unicode CLDR default content locale. Bare `de` is German as written in Germany, bare `pt` is Brazilian Portuguese and bare `en` is American English. A regional tag is a Target locale of its own, with its own translations and approvals, and it can sit beside the bare tag, which then serves every reader of that language without a closer match. Today a Site chooses from eight bare languages. Regional variants such as `de-AT` are on the roadmap. Formality is not part of the locale. Whether German pages say Sie or du is a setting on the `de` Target locale, because no tag can express it and hreflang would have no way to tell two registers apart. The [Spanish website translation guide](https://www.langrelay.com/guides/spanish-website-translation) shows tags and register together for one language. For how locales fit into a wider project, see localization vs translation and the website localization guide. ## Sources The pages this one cites, with the day each was read. 1. 01[MDN Web Docs, Intl.NumberFormat](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Intl/NumberFormat)developer.mozilla.org, checked 7 October 2026 2. 02[RFC 5646, Tags for Identifying Languages](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5646.html)rfc-editor.org, checked 7 October 2026 3. 03[WordPress Developer Resources, Localization](https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/internationalization/localization/)developer.wordpress.org, checked 7 October 2026 4. 04[Google Search Central, Tell Google about localized versions of your page](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/specialty/international/localized-versions)developers.google.com, checked 7 October 2026 5. 05[Wikipedia, Austrian German](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_German)en.wikipedia.org, checked 7 October 2026 6. 06[Wikipedia, Spanish pronouns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_pronouns)en.wikipedia.org, checked 7 October 2026 [Chris Jayden](https://www.langrelay.com/about) Founder, LangRelay Chris Jayden is the founder of LangRelay. Chris has worked on websites of every size, from large e-commerce stores to small sites with a handful of pages, and started LangRelay after years of translating them the hard way. Share - [Share on LinkedIn (opens in a new tab)](https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.langrelay.com%2Fglossary%2Flocale) - [Share on X (opens in a new tab)](https://x.com/intent/post?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.langrelay.com%2Fglossary%2Flocale&text=Locale) - hreflang - locales - localization ## Keep reading - Language guide ### [Spanish website translation: tú, usted and hreflang](https://www.langrelay.com/guides/spanish-website-translation) Translate a website into Spanish: tú or usted, Spain or Latin America, the hreflang values that work, and how LangRelay sets the register for each language. - Glossary ### [Neural machine translation](https://www.langrelay.com/glossary/neural-machine-translation) Neural machine translation uses a neural network to translate whole sentences: encoder and decoder, attention, the Transformer, and how LLMs relate to it. Book a demo ## See LangRelay on your own site Book 30 minutes with the team. 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