Locales provide the mechanism for organizing and accessing localizable resources--any objects that might change to support different languages or geographic regions. Such objects can include transcoders, collation objects, number formatters, data formatters, and time zones, among others.
Localized objects fall into one of two categories:
No locale owns the objects associated with it; the locale simply provides a way to access those objects.
The locale mechanism allows each locale and each object associated with that locale to have a set of displayable names. At a minimum, each object has a name for its locale in the default language and in English. Objects can also have names in other languages for display to end users, as illustrated in this figure:

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Locale Names
Date and Time Classes
DBCS and National Language Support
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Getting a Key for a Locale
Getting an Object from the
Current Default Locale
Getting an Object from a Specific
Locale
Iterating Through Available
Locales