Definition of a locale

A locale in Akeneo is a combination of a language (English, German, French...) and a country (United States, United Kingdom, France…). For instance, US english is represented as en_US and UK english as en_UK. Akeneo offers more than 200 locales by default that you can enable depending on your needs.

Locales allow to translate some product information in the interface. They are also very central in the PIM because they are used to set on attributes values that may differ according to each locale. For instance, instead of having several description attributes: one for each locale enabled, you will have a unique description attribute that will be filled depending on the selected locale. We will say that this attribute is localizable.

Do I need one locale enabled or more?

You can have one or more locales enabled in your PIM, but a locale must be overall seen as an export language. If you are selling the same products in countries speaking the same language like French in France, Belgium, Canada and Switzerland, you do not necessarily need to enable 4 locales: fr_FR, fr_BE, fr_CA, fr_CH. Why? Because if your product information is the same for these 4 countries, then you can only use one locale for the content. But if the content differs depending on the targetted country, you can enable several French locales and have specific content for each country.😃

If you can't find happiness with our 200 locales, you can still add new ones 😃. Follow the steps described in the How to add a new locale article.