Why does Locale.getDefault().getLanguage() in Android return the display name instead of the language code?

Question

According to the Java reference, Locale.getLanguage() is supposed to return the 2-letters lowercase ISO code of the language (e.g. en), while get

Answer 1

I don't know why this issue appears, but another standard for languages is the ISO3 code. You can call Locale.getDefault().getISO3Language() and it should return "eng" or "esp".

Answer 2

I've figured it out. This happened because I had previously called Locale.setDefault() and passed it a Locale which in turn I had created by erroneously passing it the whole language name (I took the language from a preference setting and I mistakenly picked the label of the entry instead of the value).

That is, I did:

String lang= //... here I assigned "English" while I thought
             //    I was assigning it "en"
Locale locale=new Locale(lang);
Locale.setDefault(locale);       // (*)

// and later
Locale.getLocale().getLanguage();   //returns "english"

So when I queried for the default locale, it actually was the locale I had created whose language code I had erroneously set to "english".

There are a couple of funny things, though:

1. The line (*) actually works and actually does change the locale to English (or to Spanish when I used "Spanish"), that is, setDefault() seems to accept a "malformed" locale and even understands it. But it doesn't fix it.
2. Note I used uppercase English when wrongly setting the locale, but at the end it returns "english" all lowercase.

Answer 3

Use

getResources().getConfiguration().locale.getLanguage()

and it will work just fine even though I would consider your observed behaviour a bug worth reporting..

Answer 4

Android is returning the readable names instead of the codes.

Locale.getDefault() has the string. So if you call any prints or Logs on that it'll work... meaning Locale.getDefault().toString() has your locale code.