Default locale should be en, not en-US

It seems like WordPress currently has a unnamed locale, which is the default when no translation packages are installed, but it’s actually used as en-US. The problem with this is that almost none of the world uses any of the conventions used in it. For example, the world uses Oxford English on the international stage (the UN, ISO, the IEC, the BIPM, and many people) and British English (and its variants) in countries like the UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, etc. US English is only used in the US and some historical colonies / affiliated countries such as Liberia, Philippines, and South Korea.

Furthermore, the regional settings which are used worldwide are almost invariably ISO 8601 or DMY for numeric dates (YYYY-MM-DD or DD/MM/YYYY, respectively) and RFC 2822 for full text dates (DD Month YYYY). Basically no one other than the US uses the MDY date formats (MM/DD/YYYY and Month DD, YYYY).

Given that WordPress also specifically tags pages with full locales (e.g., en-US) in the lang attribute on the root element, it’s clear that this should be changed. I’ve seen countless websites which probably were quickly set up without thinking about the locale, so they’re tagged with en-US when all of their content is in en-GB or some of the other more international variants.

My proposal is to copy all the strings from the code base (which are presumed to be in the en-US locale) to an actual en-US translation file, and change all the default text / formats to international ones such as Oxford English, ISO 8601, and RFC 2822 under the locale en, which would be labelled “English” or “English (International)”.

• This topic was modified 4 years, 10 months ago by getsnoopy.