About National Language Support

The National Language Support (NLS) functions permit applications to:

• Set the locale for the user
• Identify the language in which the user works
• Retrieve strings representing times, dates, and other information formatted correctly for the specified language and locale

NLS also includes support for keyboard layouts and language-specific fonts. For more information, see Input Method Manager and International Fonts and Text Display.

The following topics are covered in this section:

• Date and Calendar
• Digit Shapes
• Locales and Languages
• NLS Terminology
• Sorting
• Time and Date