A locale category is a particular grouping of language-specific and cultural-convention-specific data. For instance, data referring to date-and-time formatting, the names of the days of the week, names of the months, and other time-specific information is grouped into the LC_TIME category. Each category uses a set of keywords that describe the particulars of that locale subset.
The following standard categories
can be defined in a locale definition source file:
| LC_COLLATE | Defines character-collation or string-collation information |
| LC_CTYPE | Defines character classification, case conversion, and other character attributes |
| LC_MESSAGES | Defines the format for affirmative and negative responses |
| LC_MONETARY | Defines rules and symbols for formatting monetary numeric information |
| LC_NUMERIC | Defines rules and symbols for formatting nonmonetary numeric information |
| LC_TIME | Defines a list of rules and symbols for formatting time and date information. |
Note: Locale categories can only be modified by editing the locale definition source file. Do not confuse them with the environment variables of the same name, which can be set from the command line.