What's up with the language names?

Maybe they're just showing off their fancy fonts? ;-)

Sorting it all Out — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 14:03:24 GMT

You may have noticed Windows locales cart around a lot of languages.

I talked about this a bit in

LCID vs. Powerman and the Locale-name-go-round

Sorting It All Out — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 10:51:52 GMT

(If you can tell what CD is playing over here in the background right now, be sure to give yourself two

Yesterday's 'justified design' is tomorrow's 'bug we fixed'

Sorting It All Out — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 18:07:25 GMT

Way back near the end of 2005 in What's up with the language names? , I went through the many different

re: What's up with the language names?

Michael S. Kaplan — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 05:43:50 GMT

I don't think that every version of Windows universally used language and then everything else (region and script) always in parentheses 100% of the time.

Plus there is no way to say what a localizer may do here with the string once it is in their reach....

possible hack...

Maurits [MSFT] — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 03:37:48 GMT

As a workaround, does the following extract the language name? (Forgive the pseudo-Perl...)

# get the locale slanguage
$language = get_locale_slanguage();

# $language is now "Español (España)"

# strip out the " (España)" part
# or anything of the form " (...)"
$language =~ s/ $.*$$//; # ew, regular expressions

# $language is now "Español"

re: What's up with the language names?

Michael S. Kaplan — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 00:07:11 GMT

It is in fact as you indicate -- there is no methodology to get only the locazlized language, without country and script (other thanj using the .NET Framework).

re: What's up with the language names?

Serge Wautier — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 23:02:56 GMT

When the title of this post appeared in my reader, I couldn't believe you addressed my request/suggestion in only slightly more than 12 hours.

Wow !!! You rock !

> and Serge's question has been answered and all is well.

Er... I'll assume the reply to my last question (How do I retrieve the localized name of a language without the country ?) - in unmanaged contexts - is then either "you don't" or "you have a wrong requirement". I believe the requirement is not wrong especially if using MAKELANGID(PrimaryLangId, SUBLANG_NEUTRAL). So I'm left with "you don't", which was unfortunately what I feared :-(

Thanks anyway. As always, your explanation/clarification would be worth adding to the docs ! (For the ones who still do not consider this blog as being the reference itself ;-)