E Configuring Oracle Database Globalization Support

This appendix describes the following Globalization Support topics:

About NLS_LANG Environment Variable
Running Oracle Universal Installer in Different Languages

About NLS_LANG Environment Variable

Oracle provides Globalization Support that enables users to interact with a database in their preferred locale and character set settings. Setting the NLS_LANG environment variable specifies locale behavior for Oracle software. It sets the language and territory used by the client application and the database server. It also sets the character set for entering and displaying data by a client program, such as SQL*Plus.

The NLS_LANG environment variable uses the following format:

NLS_LANG=language_territory.characterset

where:

Parameter	Description
`language`	Specifies the language used for displaying Oracle messages, sorting, day names, and month names.
`territory`	Specifies the conventions for default date, monetary and numeric formats.
`characterset`	Specifies the encoding used by the client application (normally the Oracle character set that corresponds to the character set of the user terminal or the operating system)

The NLS_LANG environment variable is set as a local environment variable for the shell on all UNIX-based platforms. For example, if the operating system locale setting is en_US.UTF-8, then the corresponding NLS_LANG environment variable must be set to AMERICAN_AMERICA.AL32UTF8.

Operating system locale	`NLS_LANG` values
French (France)	FRENCH_FRANCE.WE8ISO8859P15, FRENCH_FRANCE.WE8ISO8859P1, FRENCH_FRANCE.WE8MSWIN1252, FRENCH_FRANCE.AL32UTF8
Japanese (Japan)	JAPANESE_JAPAN.JA16EUC, JAPANESE_JAPAN.JA16SJIS, JAPANESE_JAPAN.AL32UTF8

Running Oracle Universal Installer in Different Languages

Oracle Universal Installer runs by default in the selected language of your operating system. You can also run Oracle Universal Installer in the following languages:

Brazilian Portuguese
German
Japanese
Simplified Chinese
Traditional Chinese
French
Italian
Korean
Spanish

To run Oracle Universal Installer in a different language, you can use any of the following methods:

Change the language in which the operating system is running before you run Oracle Universal Installer. You can change the language in which the operating system is running by clicking Language on the Login screen and selecting the required language from the list.
To run Oracle Universal Installer in another language from the shell prompt, use a command similar to the following after changing to the Disk1 directory (or to the directory that contains the runInstaller file):
```
# LANG=language_territory.characterset ./runInstaller
```
For example, to run Oracle Universal Installer in German, use the following command:
```
# LANG=de_DE.UTF-8 ./runInstaller
```