Why does CurrentUICulture.DisplayName say "English (United States)" and not "English (United Kingdom)"?

Question

I'm in the UK, and I have a UK-bought version of Windows 7, with all settings I can possibly find set to UK (not US). When I run the following code:

Console.WriteLine(Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture.DisplayName);
Console.WriteLine(Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture.DisplayName);

The output is:

English (United States)
English (United Kingdom)

I can't figure out why the first one says United States. I was going to include this in my about window (to help debug multi-lingual issues), but it's gotten me a bit confused!

Anyone know why it doesn't say UK?

Answer 1

By default the CurrentUICulture property is driven by the Windows MUI setting.

MUI is the scheme whereby the language of the OS is displayed in a specific language and is separate from things like number and date formats. Brits don't get our own translation of the Windows UI...

Answer 2

There is no British English translation of Windows (colour vs. color) - we get the US English version.