# Country/Region & Language

&Mike.McBride; &Mike.McBride.mail;
&Krishna.Tateneni; &Krishna.Tateneni.mail;
2010-08-19
4.5
KDE
Systemsettings
locale
country
language

## Country/Region & Language

This module of the &kde; &systemsettings; allows you select customization options that depend on the region of the world that you happen to live in. There are five different tabs in this module, each of which is described in detail in the following sections.

In most cases, you can simply select the country and the language, and the other options will be set in an appropriate manner.

Below the tabs of this module, you can see a preview of what the settings look like. In addition to positive and negative numbers, you can see how positive and negative currency values, long and short dates, and times are displayed. When you change any of the settings, the preview shows the effects of the changes before you apply them.

### Locale

On the top of the this tab you can select the country or region that you want to use.

When you click on change, a dialog pops up showing major groups of countries. You can select one of these regions and see a list of the countries that are available for that region.

The settings for numbers, money, date and time will automatically switch to the corresponding values.

The main part of this tab is a list of all available languages. The &GUI; of &kde; programs will be displayed in the first language in this list. If the first language in the list is not available, the second will be used, &etc;

Using the buttons on the left side of the list you can move the order of a highlighted language up and down.

Click on the Add Language drop down box to add a language to the list. If the language is already in the list, it will be moved up to the first place in the list instead.

If only US English is available, no translations have been installed.

Note that some applications and documentations may not be translated to your language; in this case, they will automatically fall back to US English.

Language and Country/Region are independent settings. Changing a language does not automatically change the settings for numbers, currency &etc; to the corresponding country or region.

### Numbers

On this page, you can select options for how numbers are displayed. The defaults are selected automatically based on the country which is currently selected.

In the text box labeled Decimal symbol, you can type the character that you want to use to separate the decimal portion of numbers. You could put anything here you wanted to, but really, `.` and `,` are the two characters that make the most sense.

Similarly, you can choose the character which is used to group units of thousands in numbers. If no character, not even a space, is present, then there will be no separator for thousands.

The following two text boxes allow you to choose what character should be prefixed to positive and negative numbers respectively. For example, the default for English is not to have any prefix for positive numbers, and a `-` for negative numbers.

In the spinbox Decimal places you can set the number of decimal places displayed for numeric values, &ie; the number of digits after the decimal separator.

The Digit set drop down box presents digit sets which may be used instead of basic Arabic when displaying numbers. If you select a digit set other than Arabic, it will be applied only to numbers which appear in language context that admits this set (e.g. Arabic-Indic digits in application translated to Arabic language), while Arabic digits are still going to be used elsewhere.

Note that decimal symbol, thousands separator, decimal places and the set of digits used to display monetary values has to be set separately on the Money tab.

### Money

Unlike the display of ordinary numbers, conventions for currency values do vary from region to region. However, you will find that the defaults are probably fine.

The character or characters representing the currency symbol are based on the country that is currently selected. The decimal symbol, thousands separator, decimal places, and digit set for money work as they do for numbers.

For both positive and negative currency values, you can control whether the currency symbol appears before or after the numeric value, and how the sign of the value is distinguished in the display. Note that the symbols used for the sign of currency values are the same as those used for other numeric values.

If the check box labeled Prefix currency symbol is selected, the currency symbol appears before the numeric value. If this check box is cleared, then the currency symbol appears after the numeric value.

There are five choices for the way in which the sign of the currency value is handled:

- The Parentheses around option displays the numeric value within a pair of parentheses.

- The Before Quantity Money option displays the sign before the numeric value, but after any currency symbol that may be present.

- The After Quantity Money option displays the sign after the numeric value, but before any currency symbol that may be present.

- The Before Money option displays the sign before the numeric value as well as any currency symbol that may be present.

- The After Money option displays the sign after the numeric value as well as any currency symbol that may be present.

### Time & Dates

If you use a different calendar system than Gregorian, you can choose this from the first drop down box.

The next option determines if the Common Era (CE/BCE) should be used instead of the Christian Era (AD/BC)

Likewise, if numbers in date and time strings should use digits other than basic Arabic, another set of digits can be selected from the second drop down box.

On the rest of this page, there are text boxes for the time, long date, and short date, in which you can type format strings to control the way in which times and dates are displayed.

Except for the special codes described below, any other characters in the format strings are displayed literally. The special codes consist of a `%` sign followed by a character, as shown in the list of codes below:

- Time format codes:

  - `HH` - The hour according to a 24-hour clock, using two digits (00 to 23).

  - `hH` - The hour according to a 24-hour clock, using one or two digits (0 to 23).

  - `PH` (uppercase p) - The hour according to a 12-hour clock, using two digits (01 to 12).

  - `pH` (lowercase p) - The hour according to a 12-hour clock, using one or two digits (1 to 12).

  - `MM` - The current minute using two digits (00 to 59).

  - `SS` - The current second using two digits (00 to 59).

  - `AMPM` - Either am or pm depending on the hour. Useful with `PH` or `pH`.

- Date format codes:

  - `YYYY` - The year, using 4 digits.

  - `YY` - The year, using 2 digits.

  - `MM` - The month, using 2 digits (01 to 12).

  - `mM` - The month, using 1 or 2 digits (1 to 12).

  - `MONTH` - The name of the month.

  - `SHORTMONTH` - The abbreviated name of the month.

  - `DD` - The day, using 2 digits (01 to 31).

  - `dD` - The day, using 1 or 2 digits (1 to 31).

  - `WEEKDAY` - The name of the weekday.

  - `SHORTWEEKDAY` - The abbreviated name of the weekday.

Finally, there are four combo boxes which let you select the first day, the first and last working day of the week and the day of the week for religious observance in your country.

### Other

You can select the default paper format with the combo box labeled Paper Format.

Use the drop down box labeled Measure system to select Imperial or Metric systems of measurement.