Definition of a locale

A locale in Akeneo is a combination of a language like English, German, Spanish, Italian, etc. and a country like United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Sweden, etc. Thus American English is represented as en_US and British English as en_GB.

Enabling a locale in Akeneo allows you to translate your product information in this locale directly in Akeneo's interface. For instance, instead of having several description attributes: one in American English, another one in Spanish and another one in German, you can have one unique description attribute that will have a specific content for each enabled locale. We will say that this attribute is localizable.

A localizable attribute is an attribute whose values can differ according to each locale.  
Akeneo offers more than 200 locales by default that you can enable depending on your needs.

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.