Jump to content

Common Locale Data & Rules

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Common Locale Data & Rules
Developed byUnicode Consortium
Initial releaseCLDR 1.0
(19 December 2003; 22 years ago (2003-12-19)[1])
Latest release
49[2] Edit this on Wikidata
21 October 2026; 24 days ago (21 October 2026)
Container forXML[3]
Websitecldr.unicode.org

The Common Locale Data & Rules, formerly the Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) is a project of the Unicode Consortium to provide locale data in XML format for use in computer applications. CLDR contains locale-specific information that an operating system will typically provide to applications.

The language CLDR is written in was formerly called the Locale Data Markup Language (LDML). In version 49, the name Common Locale Data & Rules was adopted, and designated as referring both to the language specification, and to the data itself.[4]

CLDR is maintained by a technical committee which includes employees from IBM, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and some government-based organizations. The committee is chaired by Mark Davis of Google; Annemarie Apple of Google is vice-chair.[5]

Details

[edit]

Among the types of data that CLDR includes are the following:

  • Translations for language names
  • Translations for territory and country names
  • Translations for currency names, including singular/plural modifications
  • Translations for weekday, month, era, period of day, in full and abbreviated forms
  • Translations for time zones and example cities (or similar) for time zones
  • Translations for calendar fields
  • Patterns for formatting/parsing dates or times of day
  • Exemplar sets of characters used for writing the language
  • Patterns for formatting/parsing numbers
  • Rules for language-adapted collation
  • Rules for spelling out numbers as words
  • Rules for formatting numbers in traditional numeral systems (such as Roman and Armenian numerals)
  • Rules for transliteration between scripts, much of it based on BGN/PCGN romanization

The information is currently used in International Components for Unicode, Apple's macOS, LibreOffice, MediaWiki, and IBM's AIX, among other applications and operating systems.

CLDR overlaps somewhat with ISO/IEC 15897 (POSIX locales). POSIX locale information can be derived from CLDR by using some of CLDR's conversion tools.

The CLDR covers more than 400 languages.[6]

References

[edit]
  1. ↑ "CLDR Releases/Downloads". cldr.unicode.org.
  2. ↑ "Release 49". 21 October 2026. Retrieved 22 October 2026.
  3. ↑ Updating DTDs, CLDR makes special use of XML because of the way it is structured. In particular, the XML is designed so that you can read in a CLDR XML file and interpret it as an unordered list of <path,value> pairs, called a CLDRFile internally. These path/value pairs can be added to or deleted, and then the CLDRFile can be written back out to disk, resulting in a valid XML file. That is a very powerful mechanism, and also allows for the CLDR inheritance model.
  4. ↑ "Unicode CLDR 49 Released". The Unicode Blog. 22 October 2026. Retrieved 23 October 2026.
  5. ↑ "CLDR Process".
  6. ↑ "Locale Coverage".
[edit]