Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised Jun 7, 2026

Common Locale Data Repository

The Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) is a project of the Unicode Consortium to provide locale data in XML format for use in computer applications. CLDR contains locale-specific information that an operating system will typically provide to applications. CLDR is written in the Locale Data Markup Language (LDML).

Last revised
Jun 7, 2026
Read time
≈ 2 min
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Citations
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Source
Wikipedia ↗
Common Locale Data Repository
Developed byUnicode Consortium
Initial releaseCLDR 1.0
(19 December 2003 (2003-12-19)1)
Latest release
48.22 Edit this on Wikidata
17 March 2026 (17 March 2026)
Container forXML3
Websitecldr.unicode.org

The Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) is a project of the Unicode Consortium to provide locale data in XML format for use in computer applications. CLDR contains locale-specific information that an operating system will typically provide to applications. CLDR is written in the Locale Data Markup Language (LDML).

CLDR is maintained by a technical committee which includes employees from IBM, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and some government-based organizations. The committee is chaired by Mark Davis of Google; Annemarie Apple of Google is vice-chair.4

Details

Among the types of data that CLDR includes are the following:

  • Translations for language names
  • Translations for territory and country names
  • Translations for currency names, including singular/plural modifications
  • Translations for weekday, month, era, period of day, in full and abbreviated forms
  • Translations for time zones and example cities (or similar) for time zones
  • Translations for calendar fields
  • Patterns for formatting/parsing dates or times of day
  • Exemplar sets of characters used for writing the language
  • Patterns for formatting/parsing numbers
  • Rules for language-adapted collation
  • Rules for spelling out numbers as words
  • Rules for formatting numbers in traditional numeral systems (such as Roman and Armenian numerals)
  • Rules for transliteration between scripts, much of it based on BGN/PCGN romanization

The information is currently used in International Components for Unicode, Apple's macOS, LibreOffice, MediaWiki, and IBM's AIX, among other applications and operating systems.

CLDR overlaps somewhat with ISO/IEC 15897 (POSIX locales). POSIX locale information can be derived from CLDR by using some of CLDR's conversion tools.

The CLDR covers 400+ languages.5

References

References

  1. "CLDR Releases/Downloads". cldr.unicode.org.
  2. "Release 48.2". 17 March 2026. Retrieved 2 April 2026.
  3. Updating DTDs, CLDR makes special use of XML because of the way it is structured. In particular, the XML is designed so that you can read in a CLDR XML file and interpret it as an unordered list of <path,value> pairs, called a CLDRFile internally. These path/value pairs can be added to or deleted, and then the CLDRFile can be written back out to disk, resulting in a valid XML file. That is a very powerful mechanism, and also allows for the CLDR inheritance model.
  4. "CLDR Process".
  5. "Locale Coverage".
External links