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Language Identifiers

  • Article

A language identifier is a standard international numeric abbreviation for the language in a country or geographical region. Each language has a unique language identifier (data type LANGID), a 16-bit value that consists of a primary language identifier and a sublanguage identifier. For details of language identifiers, see Language Identifier Constants and Strings.

A language identifier is constructed using the MAKELANGID macro. The following illustration shows the format of the bits in a language identifier.

+-------------------------+-------------------------+
|     SubLanguage ID      |   Primary Language ID   |
+-------------------------+-------------------------+
15                    10  9                         0   bit

The following are predefined language identifiers:

  • LANG_SYSTEM_DEFAULT. The operating system default language.
  • LANG_USER_DEFAULT. The language of the current user.

Your application can retrieve the current language identifiers by using the Multilingual User Interface functions.

Locales and Languages

Language Identifier Constants and Strings

Multilingual User Interface

MAKELANGID