Meaning of the .utf8 suffix in a LANG setting

Question

If I set LANG as follows

export LANG=fr_CA.utf8

I believe this means use the rules for French, as spoken in Canada, for currency, time, date, collation etc, and the underlying codeset is utf8 (and not for instance an 8 bit ASCII variant).

Is this correct. If so - could someone point me to a definitive reference please so I can educate others in my company.

Answer 1

More or less.

The user can set the locale for categories such as currency (LC_MONETARY), time, date (LC_TIME), collation (LC_CTYPE), etc. separately, overriding LANG. As for the locale names, they are not necessarily the same on all systems (may be influenced by /etc/locale.gen and what's installed in /usr/share/locale), but the provided glibc locale names

Most locale names follow XPG syntax and consist of up to four parts:

language[_territory[.codeset]][@modifier]