What happens if the user selects American English but I only provide "English"?

Question

For example: I have an en.lproj subdirectory in my application bundle which contains all English content.

Now, Apple says that users can choose not only a language, but also some kind of dialect too. So we may have here "American English" or "British English". The user might choose American English, and then what happens next?

Like I understand, the System would look for an en_US.lproj subdirectory. Is it clever enough to then see: "Oh no, there is no en_US.lproj, but there is an en.lproj"? Or would it be dumb as bread and select fr.lproj or de.lproj?

Answer 1

I see two solutions:

• Set "en" as default developpement language (in your Info.plist),
• Copy en.lproj directory to en_US.lproj directory each time you make a distribution build (if your default language is not english).

But maybe after "en_US", the system looks for "en". I don't know..

Answer 2

According to the "hints" in the Official Documentation (and also common sense) I would assume that it will fallback form "en_US" to "en" (the documentation says, that the region _US is optional.

However I remember some posts in the apple dev forums, that "en" is preferred over "en_US" if existent. But I might have got that wrong.