I Pretend I'm from Denmark

A user explains why they configure their computer to report a Danish locale despite having no ties to Denmark: to get English interface text combined with international conventions like metric units, A4 paper, ISO date (YYYY‑MM‑DD) and weeks that start on Monday. Many English locales bundled with desktop environments impose unwanted conventions - US uses imperial units and Sunday weeks, UK mixes metric and imperial and uses slashed dates, others use AM/PM or regional numbering - so Denmark is a pragmatic compromise. A supposedly global option, en_001 (English World), exists in CLDR but is poorly supported, can break parsers, and glibc doesn’t ship it by default, so it isn’t a reliable solution. Proposals like creating en_ISO/en_SI run into limits of ISO country codes and backward-compatibility problems.

The practical workaround is to set system-wide locale defaults and override specific LC_* categories so language and regional conventions are decoupled. On Linux this can be done with localectl: keep LANG as an English variant and override LC_TIME, LC_MEASUREMENT, LC_PAPER and LC_MONETARY with an en_DK (and even other) locales. The writeup lists the LC_ categories (time, numeric, monetary, measurement, paper, messages, collation, character types, name/address/telephone formats, etc.) and warns desktop environments may override system defaults. The conclusion: a truly international English locale would be ideal but is unlikely soon, so people who want English plus international standards must continue to pretend to be from elsewhere.