powershellwindows-10localeculturecurrentculture

Issue with English non-US Culture


I am able to use Set-Culture (Powershell as Admin) to set the Current Culture to "en-DE" which is English (Germany). However, when I run the different PS commands to view the Current Culture, I am still getting en-US. I checked my Region (Format) and Location as well.

Do I have to change the system locale as well to Germany (German) ?

This is causing an error in an application, because the datetime format is different from en-DE to en-US and causing the date to be read incorrectly.

When I Set-Culture to de-DE, everything appears to be in working order.

I make sure to run Powershell Console as Administrator, Set-Culture, close console. Open Powershell and run Get-Culture, [CultureInfo]::CurrentCulture, [CultureInfo]::CurrentUICulture and a few more to check and and still getting en-US


Solution

  • Note: Use of en-DE as a culture identifier - i.e., mixing language en (English) with normally unrelated region/country DE (Germany) - requires Windows 10 with release channel 1607 or later or Windows Server 2016, according to Microsoft.

    However, there's a bug that prevents use of such mixed cultures, observed on Windows 10 Pro (64-bit; Version 1709, OS Build: 16299.371)

    While you can successfully set such mixed-culture values with Set-Culture, subsequent sessions do not recognize it and fall back to en-US (as reflected in $PSCulture, Get-Culture and [cultureinfo]::currentCulture)


    The rest of this answer discusses persistently setting the current user's culture in general, irrespective of the bug.


    Set-Culture - via the registry - sets the culture for future PowerShell sessions (only), not (also) for the current session.

    Get-Culture, by contrast, only ever reports the current session's culture at session-startup time. That is, if you change the culture during a session (see below), it will not be reflected in Get-Culture.

    In order to also apply the newly set culture to the current session, run the following in addition to the Set-Culture call:

    [cultureinfo]::CurrentCulture = 'de-DE'
    

    Caveat re interactive (command-line) use:


    This perhaps surprising asymmetry - Set-Culture only applying to future sessions, but Get-Culture reporting the current session's (startup) culture - is something that may change in future PowerShell Core versions.