A locale specifies cultural and language characteristics of the z/OS UNIX environment for an application program. Locale affects collation, date and time conventions, numeric and monetary formats, program messages, yes and no prompts, and the hexadecimal encoding for the 13 variant characters whose encoding varies on different EBCDIC code pages.

The shells and utilities support a variety of locales. See Changing the locale in the shell for information about changing the locale in the shells.