Is it possible to have non-English regional settings with English day/month names?

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I live in Estonia where most regional settings (number, currency and date formats) differ from those used in English-speaking countries. For instance, decimal symbol is comma, thousands separator is space, date format is day-month-year, etc. However, if I set my regional settings to Estonian, then day and month names are also shown in Estonian everywhere:

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This is slightly annoying since the language used for the rest of Windows is English and I'd like the day and month names to be consistent with it. Is this possible while still keeping the local regional settings?

One workaround I've tried is to set regional settings to, say, English (UK) and then customise them to match Estonian settings, but that messes up alphabetic sorting - accented letters like "ö" and "ä" are no longer distinguished from their non-accented versions, and "z" is sorted as last rather than at its correct position in the Estonian alphabet (between "s" and "t").

OS is Windows 7 Professional, in case that matters.

Edit: alternatively, if there's no built-in way to accomplish what I want, is it possible to create a custom set of regional settings (like one can create custom keyboard layouts)?

Indrek

Posted 2012-06-07T18:23:09.483

Reputation: 21 756

As far as I tried this is not possible directly but you can try this Article through GPO and also this Article with setlocale may be helpful for you.

– avirk – 2012-06-09T07:41:39.840

@avirk Thanks, but those articles seem to just describe how to force certain regional settings. Beyond that, they don't offer anything I can't already do through the regional settings control panel already. – Indrek – 2012-06-10T10:53:27.973

However I can't find why this behavior going on while I set up my regional language to HINDI and then checked out the calender but it was in UK format. – avirk – 2012-06-10T10:55:24.700

@avirk This is what I see when I change my regional settings to Hindi: http://i.imgur.com/wb6Zb.png

– Indrek – 2012-06-10T11:30:32.967

But not me I see that in UK format. – avirk – 2012-06-10T11:31:58.853

Give me the link of screen shot where you start to adjust settings for regional and let me find out whats is the problem, if I can? – avirk – 2012-06-10T11:33:00.147

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@avirk Control Panel -> Clock, Language, and Region -> Region and Language. http://i.imgur.com/M6MYw.png. Notice that there, too, day and month names are translated. Same with every other setting.

– Indrek – 2012-06-10T11:37:16.110

http://imgur.com/cBvVd see this. – avirk – 2012-06-10T15:19:02.970

@avirk Okay... what exactly am I looking at? – Indrek – 2012-06-10T16:02:53.207

Answers

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There is a tool Microsoft released for Vista, called Locale Builder. You may download it from Ms here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=5662

It allows you to build a customized locale (based on Estonian in your case) and then create an installer for it.
It's designed for Vista so you have to run it in compatibility mode, but besides that (and it's quirky desire to re-run setup/configuration each time) it run fine on Win 7 pro.

Few screens: locale builder main screen

You can see here I selected et-EE as base locale and modified Full day names, except for Saturday and Sunday.

After you're satisfied with your setup, select Build - this will create an msi installer, which you need to run to actually install a customized locale on your system. After that go into Regional Settings and select your new locale. This is result on my test system: modified locale

Note: Obviously I have no way to properly test this setup, so I cannot tell if running custom locale will not break/cause problems with your installed base. Proceed with caution.

wmz

Posted 2012-06-07T18:23:09.483

Reputation: 6 132

Thanks, that seems exactly like what I'm after. I'll give it a shot and report back. – Indrek – 2012-10-14T12:48:14.233

Well, it's not quite perfect - while I was able to change the day and month names to English, which seems to work great, sorting is still a bit messed up. I'll experiment with it a bit more, but since this is an official utility from Microsoft, I guess I'm not going to find anything better, so I've accepted your answer. Thanks for the help! – Indrek – 2012-10-15T04:02:15.767

Asked: 2012-06-07T18:23:09.483

Viewed: 1 490 times

Active: 2012-10-14T10:58:54.860