warning: setlocale: LC_ALL: cannot change locale

Question

I want to switch to French locale. So I tried the below command:

myUbundu@myUbundu-desktop:~$ export LC_ALL=fr_FR

But I am getting the warning

-bash: warning: setlocale: LC_ALL: cannot change locale (fr_FR)

How to set the locale to French? Do I need to install additional packages?

Related: How do I fix my locale issue? – kenorb Apr 18 '18 at 15:49 — kenorb, Apr 18 '18 at 15:49

score 61 · Accepted Answer · edited Mar 21 '12 at 13:27

61

Try the following commands

sudo locale-gen fr_FR
sudo update-locale LANG=fr_FR

edited Mar 21 '12 at 13:27

enzotib

93,831

answered Mar 21 '12 at 12:00

LnxSlck

12,256

7

sudo: locale-gen: command not found Do I need to install that tool? How? – dialex Aug 02 '17 at 10:48
1

@DiAlex without the ':' after sudo – infoclogged Aug 23 '17 at 22:45
2

@infoclogged He pasted the output indicating that he does not have the locale-gen installed. What is the package name for locale-gen is my question too. – dhill Oct 04 '18 at 14:59
2

sudo apt install locales should do. – dibery May 05 '22 at 03:36

score 40 · Answer 2 · edited Nov 10 '20 at 07:56

40

I've had the same issue, and none of the answers worked, except dpkg-reconfigure locales. But it is too time consuming to do it this way. Just uncomment all the locales you need in /etc/locale.gen and run locale-gen. Or do it from the command line (as root):

echo "en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8" > /etc/locale.gen
echo "fr_FR.UTF-8 UTF-8" >> /etc/locale.gen
locale-gen

edited Nov 10 '20 at 07:56

BuZZ-dEE

14,223

answered Nov 05 '17 at 12:07

Alek_A

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6
8

5

Contrary to the other answer this worked for me as well. – user643011 Dec 27 '17 at 01:17
2

Contrary to the accepted answer, this also worked for me (Ubuntu 16-04) though I just looked in the locale.gen file and uncommented the locales I wanted. – Dark Star1 Jan 08 '19 at 15:11
1

Among all the answers (including the accepted one), this is the only one worked for me. – Gordon Bai Mar 28 '21 at 15:05
1

same, i tried all the others, but this worked, thanks mate for getting the annoying error out – ASHu2 Jul 03 '23 at 06:16

score 15 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 22 '12 at 19:05

15

I have fought with this for a week or so.

The most reliable (and easiest too) for me was to edit my profile file with

gedit ~/.profile

An add this language variables to be set at every login

LANG="en_AU.UTF-8"
LANGUAGE="en_AU:en"

You need to log out and back in for the change to take effect.

answered Sep 22 '12 at 19:05

Aas

271

This also works from the command line, when you only want to change it for a certain time. – daniel kullmann Mar 31 '17 at 12:06

kenorb · Answer 4 · 2019-06-12T11:46:08.937

3

Try installing language pack for French, e.g.

sudo apt-get install language-pack-fr

For any other language, run: check-language-support -l CODE to check the supported packages, e.g.

$ check-language-support -l fr
firefox-locale-fr gimp-help-fr hunspell-fr language-pack-fr language-pack-gnome-fr thunderbird-locale-fr wfrench

Check also: LC_ALL: cannot change locale.

edited Jun 12 '19 at 11:46

answered Apr 18 '18 at 15:47

kenorb

10,347

score 2 · Answer 5 · answered Nov 03 '20 at 15:06

2

UTF-8

Here is the UTF-8 version of the most voted answer.

I received the following error:

-bash: warning: setlocale: LC_ALL: cannot change locale (en_IE.UTF-8)

Issuing the following command sufficed to get rid of this bash warning:

$ sudo locale-gen en_IE.UTF-8

P.S.: The Irish locale en_IE.UTF-8 provides English language with euro € as a currency.

answered Nov 03 '20 at 15:06

Serge Stroobandt

5,268
1
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This works only if en_IE.UTF-8 is already specified in/etc/locale.gen. But since locale-gen does not accept (ignores) arguments you can issue sudo locale-gen w/o any arguments as long as your preferred locale is already listed in /etc/locale.gen. See @Alek_A answer for a more efficient approach – silverdr Mar 03 '24 at 23:18

score 1 · Answer 6 · answered Jun 09 '23 at 03:07

This system had this problem and none of the other solutions worked. After grepping around, .xsessionrc had defined corrupted values. Maybe some program created it and it shouldn't be there? Anyway, corrected to reflect system settings:

export LC_ALL=fr_FR.UTF-8
export LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8
export LANGUAGE=fr_FR.UTF-8

warning: setlocale: LC_ALL: cannot change locale

6 Answers6

UTF-8

Linked

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