A locale is a language, but specific to a region
Loco supports languages with or without regional information, but the term "locale" is used across the site even when it refers to just a language.
Regions and variants
Some languages may be spoken or written quite differently in more than one location. For example, adding Portuguese to your project may not be specific enough. You'll most likely want to differentiate between European and Brazilian Portuguese by specifying the region.
Some languages have different dialects or might just differ slightly within the same country. For example, English spoken in Scotland is the same language that's spoken in the rest of the United Kingdom, but if you need to be more specific you can specify a variant.
Locale codes
Loco expresses locales with a short code, but unless you're a developer you won't have to interact with these codes very much, or even at all. These codes are sometimes called language tags. It's worth knowing something about them if you're working with developers.
From our examples above:
- Portuguese is
"pt", but adding a region could make it either"pt-PT"for Portugal or"pt-BR"for Brazil. - British English is
"en-GB", but a Scottish variant would be"en-GB-scotland"or just"en-scotland".