It may be one of the reasons there are different Arabic locales

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2011/09/10 09:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2011/09/10/10208823.aspx

So I was asked the other day in response to my blog The example was wrong, but the point of the example was spot on!, and the part of the blog that said:

And note I am assuming that all sixteen of the Arabic locales on Windows all support the exact same spelling of the Hijri month names, even though some have slightly different spelling of the Gregorian month names (and other dialectical differences as well). Maybe this is more reasonable to let slide, even if there are in-county differences in Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Oman, Yemen, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Kuwait, U.A.E., Bahrain, or Qatar. Certainly more than the ones I mentioned earlier.

asking me for more details.

I'll start by giving the generic values for the three Gregorian calendars related to Arabic:

• CAL_GREGORIAN_ARABIC - Gregorian Arabic
• CAL_GREGORIAN_XLIT_ENGLISH - Gregorian transliterated English
• CAL_GREGORIAN_XLIT_FRENCH - Gregorian transliterated French

for the first clue:

Ok, got it? Three different ways of looking at the same month name.

Then, when you look at the LOCALE_SMONTNAME* values that represent the localized Gregorian month names for each locale, you may be able to see the pattern:

You now see a bunch of things:

The ar-IQ, ar-SY, ar-JO, and ar-LB locales generally use the CAL_GREGORIAN_ARABIC style names.

While ar-DZ and ar-TN are mostly using the CAL_GREGORIAN_XLIT_ENGLISH style Arabic names.

And ar-SA, ar-EG, ar-LY, ar-OM, ar-YE, ar-KW, ar-AE, ar-LB, and ar-QA seem to be using the Gregorian transliterated French style Arabic name.

The odd man out is ar-MA, which has differences from all of them for some months.

And you can likely spot other similarities and differences yourself among various months as well (more if you can read Arabic obviously, but even if not you can probably see differences with the shapes).

The end result is of course that beyond the three big categories that would represent three different ways of spelling the month names, there are other differences as well.

Perhaps these are bugs simply never reported by any customer.

Though more likely they are mostly some random yet specific known differences between countries, for the host of reasons that things can be spelled differently for the same language in different areas.

Thinking back to The example was wrong, but the point of the example was spot on! a moment, it's hard to imagine that among all 16 countries there are not also any differences among the Hijri month names too.

Which, if true, would mean that in addition to the many non-Arabic language and in some cases Arabic script locales that use the Hijri calendar and are forced to use the Arabic language, they may even be some Arabic language instances that might have differences in the Hijri month names too?

It may be one of the reasons there are different Arabic locales. Though in the case of the Hijri issue (if it exists) we're not covering it?

Anyone who knows the Arabic language want to comment on some of the other differences?

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