What is the locale on redhat and linux operating systems?

[petulia3478]

Man page for locale(1).
Man page for locale(7).

Also see: How do i control language and keyboard settings on redhat 7?

Note: Locales apply to many operating systems, Linux, Unix, others.

There is a good brief on Wikipedia, familiarise yourself with what it is used for:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locale_(computer_software)

For example the following reads, en = english language, GB = Great Britain, with the UFT-8 encoding.

$ locale
LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

Good descriptions of each of the above, can be found in Man page for locale(7)..

Obtain more information about the variables.

       -k, --keyword-name
              For  each  keyword  whose value is being displayed, include also
              the name of that keyword, so that the output has the format:

                  keyword="value"

$ locale -k LC_TELEPHONE
tel_int_fmt="+%c %a %l"
tel_dom_fmt="%A %l"
int_select="00"
int_prefix="44"
telephone-codeset="UTF-8"