Reposted by Patricia Rossini
🚨New publication alert! @patyrossini.bsky.social led a new article with @antoniskalog.bsky.social and me investigating the effects of electoral misinformation on political intolerance in the 2022 Brazilian elections.
Patricia Rossini
@patyrossini.bsky.social
4.6K followers 420 following 30 posts
Senior lecturer (assoc. prof) in Communication, Media & Democracy, University of Glasgow. Studies digital threats to democracy 🇧🇷🏴
![You can actually change R’s localization settings to get output in different languages!
If you want to see what your computer is currently set to use, run Sys.getLocale():
> Sys.getlocale()
## [1] "en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8"
There’s a bunch of output there—the first part (en_US.UTF-8) is the most important and tells you the language code. The code here follows a pattern and has three parts:
- A language: en. This is the langauge, and typically uses a two-character abbreviation following the ISO 639 standard
- A territory: US. This is the country or region for that language, used mainly to specify the currency. If it’s set to en_US, it’ll use US conventions (like “$” and “color”); if it’s set to en_GB it’ll use British conventions (like “£” and “colour”). It uses a two-character abbreviation following the ISO 3166 standard.
- An encoding: UTF-8. This is how the text is actually represented and stored on the computer. This defaults to Unicode (UTF-8) here. You don’t generally need to worry about this.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:2zcfjzyocp6kapg6jc4eacok/bafkreihm4fjqhut2lpx7hpk6u7xdyei7ht3jrcwmkv6llu62tvm3pdqicm)
![For macOS and Linux (i.e. Posit Cloud), setting locale details is pretty straightforward and predictable because they both follow this pattern consistently:
- en_GB: British English
- fr_FR: French in France
- fr_CH: French in Switzerland
- de_CH: German in Switzerland
- de_DE: German in Germany
If you run locale -a in your terminal (not in your R console) on macOS or in Posit Cloud, you’ll get a list of all the different locales your computer can use. Here’s what I have on my computer:
[1] "af_ZA" "am_ET" "be_BY" "bg_BG" "C" "ca_ES" "cs_CZ" "da_DK" "de_AT" "de_CH" "de_DE" "el_GR" "en_AU" "en_CA"
[15] "en_GB" "en_IE" "en_NZ" "en_US" "es_ES" "et_EE" "eu_ES" "fi_FI" "fr_BE" "fr_CA" "fr_CH" "fr_FR" "he_IL" "hi_IN"
[29] "hr_HR" "hu_HU" "hy_AM" "is_IS" "it_CH" "it_IT" "ja_JP" "kk_KZ" "ko_KR" "lt_LT" "nl_BE" "nl_NL" "no_NO" "pl_PL"
[43] "POSIX" "pt_BR" "pt_PT" "ro_RO" "ru_RU" "sk_SK" "sl_SI" "sr_YU" "sv_SE" "tr_TR" "uk_UA" "zh_CN" "zh_HK" "zh_TW"
For whatever reason, Windows doesn’t use this naming convention. It uses dashes or full words instead, like en-US or american or en-CA or canadian. You can see a list here, or google Windows language country strings (that’s actually RStudio’s official recommendation for finding Windows language codes)](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:2zcfjzyocp6kapg6jc4eacok/bafkreifix7jpdvgndwegw2wffcortpw6yjsw5k6v6xkli7ufz7e3lfzxta)
![Those functions have a locale argument, though, so it’s really easy to switch between languages:
> wday(x, label = TRUE, abbr = FALSE, locale = "en_US")
## [1] Friday
## Levels: Sunday < Monday < Tuesday < Wednesday < Thursday < Friday < Saturday
> wday(x, label = TRUE, abbr = FALSE, locale = "fr_FR")
## [1] Vendredi
## Levels: Dimanche < Lundi < Mardi < Mercredi < Jeudi < Vendredi < Samedi
> wday(x, label = TRUE, abbr = FALSE, locale = "fr_BE")
## [1] Vendredi
## Levels: Dimanche < Lundi < Mardi < Mercredi < Jeudi < Vendredi < Samedi
> wday(x, label = TRUE, abbr = FALSE, locale = "it_IT")
## [1] Venerdì
## Levels: Domenica < Lunedì < Martedì < Mercoledì < Giovedì < Venerdì < Sabato
> wday(x, label = TRUE, abbr = FALSE, locale = "zh_CN")
## [1] 星期五
## Levels: 星期日 < 星期一 < 星期二 < 星期三 < 星期四 < 星期五 < 星期六](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:2zcfjzyocp6kapg6jc4eacok/bafkreigwhd7lx2vcb2neeuasd54vtaiiqehmw4ooddb3a25y4wyjcx23ru)
![You can also set the locale for your entire R session like this:
> Sys.setlocale(locale = "de_DE")
## [1] "de_DE/de_DE/de_DE/C/de_DE/en_US.UTF-8"
Now month() and wday() will use German by default without needing to set the locale argument:
> month(x, label = TRUE, abbr = FALSE)
## [1] Juli
## 12 Levels: Januar < Februar < März < April < Mai < Juni < Juli < August < September < Oktober < ... < Dezember
> wday(x, label = TRUE, abbr = FALSE)
## [1] Freitag
## Levels: Sonntag < Montag < Dienstag < Mittwoch < Donnerstag < Freitag < Samstag](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:2zcfjzyocp6kapg6jc4eacok/bafkreiafavwrb3btz77zlw6ok3qnkft5giukstdwxor2zk4mi3yncy6z6i)
