Add new locale en_ID (Indonesian English)

[Gary Dean]

Please see attached submission for a new locale for Indonesian English (en_ID).

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Thanks for your proposal, Gary.

What would the purpose of this locale be? English isn't an official language in Indonesia, is it?

[Gary Dean (garydean)]

While English is not widely spoken in Indonesia as a proportion of it's population, it is the standard language of business and the professions, and among Indonesia's urban middle class.

Probably 3-5% of Indonesia's 250 million people use English on a daily basis, twice the population of Singapore.

The en_ID locale conforms to Indonesian standards relating to country codes, currency, time and date formats.

The en_ID locale was developed by Yayasan Teknologi Terbuka Indonesia (Indonesian Open Technology Foundation).

http://yatti.id/doku.php/en/en_id-indonesian-english-project

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Note that this kind of combinatorial inflation should usually not be added to locales. You can set independent locales for the language and the region to use in the control panel. E. g. you could choose en_GB or en_US (depending on the preference) for the language, and id_ID for the region (date/time, money, paper size, etc.).

[Gary Dean (garydean)]

It is precisely this kind of combination that leads to all kinds of inconsistency across systems within the country, or worse, users defaulting to whatever English the machine was set up for and using oddball date and time formats, and using inappropriate currency and decimal setups, leading to confusion.

There is no satisfactory combination of existing locales (eg, en_US language with id_ID region) that accommodate English language and region settings. In the case of decimals, for example, the convention in Indonesian English is to use periods and not commas, as is the standard for Indonesian language.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

The base for the locales in the Ubuntu repository is the collection of locales in upstream glibc. So Gary, to move this matter forward I'd suggest that you file a similar request in the upstream bug tracker

https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?component=localedata&id=glibc

and post the URL to the upstream bug here. If the request is approved by the upstream maintainers, we'll soon patch an en_ID locale in Ubuntu.

In the meantime, a possible setup for someone using Indonesian English might be to use en_US in Language Support for both language and regional formats, and make modifications in the ~/.profile file. Example lines to be added to ~/.profile:

export LC_TIME=en_DK.UTF-8
export LC_MONETARY=id_ID.UTF-8

[Gary Dean (garydean)]

Thank you for your direction.

I have posted the request for the en_ID locale, which can be found at

https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=19010