What does 'Language neutral' mean with regard to MAKELANGID?

Question

Hello,

The docs for MAKELANGID specify that MAKELANGID(LANG_NEUTRAL, SUBLANG_NEUTRAL) Means 'Language neutral'.

This seems to be English on my machine (tried it with FormatMessage), but what does it mean in general? Is it guarenteed to be English?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I would expect that this means that the strings associated with the lang id are not specific to any language - which could be useful to know for a localisation team. "%1 + %2 = %3" would be an example of one such string.

Answer 2

No, it is not "gauranteed to be English." It "is" whatever you place into it at that point (English, in your case). But it means that it should not serve as a (language) satellite assembly (except maybe as a fallback).

Answer 3

with sublanguage = SUBLANG_DEFAULT this would be the user's default language. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms534732(VS.85).aspx

Here's a note on the sublanguage identifier - http://wiki.winehq.org/SublangNeutral.

Note that MAKELANGID creates a language identifier for you from the primary language and sublanguage identifier - it does "not" get the default language, or anything like that.