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33.12 Locales

POSIX defines a concept of “locales” which control which language to use in language-related features. These Emacs variables control how Emacs interacts with these features.

— Variable: locale-coding-system

This variable specifies the coding system to use for decoding system error messages, for encoding the format argument to format-time-string, and for decoding the return value of format-time-string.

— Variable: system-messages-locale

This variable specifies the locale to use for generating system error messages. Changing the locale can cause messages to come out in a different language or in a different orthography. If the variable is nil, the locale is specified by environment variables in the usual POSIX fashion.

— Variable: system-time-locale

This variable specifies the locale to use for formatting time values. Changing the locale can cause messages to appear according to the conventions of a different language. If the variable is nil, the locale is specified by environment variables in the usual POSIX fashion.