How neutral culture is mapped to a specific culture in CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture method?

Question

I don't know how Neutral Culture is mapped to a Specific Culture. Is it static like below?

en = en-US    
fr = fr-FR    
pt = pt-BR

I checked http://referencesource.microsoft.com/#mscorlib/system/globalization/cultureinfo.cs,44db57d9e190258e,references

& nativeInitCultureData from https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/blob/master/src/classlibnative/nls/nlsinfo.cpp

but I couldn't understand. Anyone can help?

Answer 1

I don't think there is an exact mapping here.

en and en-US cultures are different based on their LCID property which has 0x0009 and 0x0409 in order. The en is a neural culture that is associated with a language but not with a country or region.

But en-US is a specific culture which associated with both a language and a country or region.

That's why you can create a RegionInfo with en-US

var region = new RegionInfo("en-US");

but you can't create with en

var region = new RegionInfo("en");

which says;

The region name en should not correspond to neutral culture; a specific culture name is required.

There is an hierarchy between CultureInfo objects which the Parent of a specific culture is a neutral culture and the parent of a neutral culture is the InvariantCulture.

Let me visualize it for you how this hierarchy works for en neutral culture:

Answer 2

Almost, there is a parent relationship between cultures. You can see this via:

var specificCultures = System.Globalization.CultureInfo.GetCultures(System.Globalization.CultureTypes.SpecificCultures);
foreach (var culture in specificCultures)
{
     var text = "Specific: " + culture.Name + " Parent: " + culture.Parent.Name;
     Console.WriteLine(text);
}

Giving (extract of output):

Specific: ar-SA Parent: ar
Specific: bg-BG Parent: bg
Specific: ca-ES Parent: ca
Specific: zh-TW Parent: zh-CHT
Specific: cs-CZ Parent: cs
Specific: da-DK Parent: da
Specific: de-DE Parent: de
Specific: el-GR Parent: el
Specific: en-US Parent: en
Specific: fi-FI Parent: fi
Specific: fr-FR Parent: fr
Specific: he-IL Parent: he

You can see from this snippet that the parent of zh-TW is zh-CHT. But that does get down to zh eventually (via zh-Hant). Following a parent of a specific culture will get you down to a neutral one eventually.