What is the 1033 directory or the 0409 folder?

Directories with one or more of these numbers probably litter your hard drive. Microsoft Office has them all over the place (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office10\1033). If you have installed the Plus pack, you will have a your theme files in C:\WINDOWS\Resources\1033. The .Net framework probaly installed a 1033 folder and the seach assistant has by default on my PC a C:\WINDOWS\srchasst\mui\0409. Your PC may have different numbers such as 1031 or 2057 on these directories.

For years I’ve wondered what the 1033 direcotry was. A search for that number reveals it is associated with localization settings. 1033 is a Locale ID or known more succicntly as a LCID.

So, if you look at Microsoft’s locale identification here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/script56/html/882ca1eb-81b6-4a73-839d-154c6440bf70.asp

You can see that 1033 (0409 in hex) is United states English, my locale.

English has the following sub languages
us 1033
gb 2057
au 3087
ca 4105
[and many more]

There’s obviously a patter there. 1033 is fairly close to 1024. So, if we subtract out 1024, we get 9. Is 9 associated with English some how?

A Google for Language English 0x09 says it is… http://www.liquidninja.com/metapad/translations/language_ids.html

which reveals sublanguages
http://www.liquidninja.com/metapad/translations/language_ids.html#sec
0x01 SUBLANG_ENGLISH_US English (US)
0x02 SUBLANG_ENGLISH_UK English (UK)
0x03 SUBLANG_ENGLISH_AUS English (Australian)
0x04 SUBLANG_ENGLISH_CAN English (Canadian)

So how do we get 2057 for GB? Well, it’s pretty close to 2048 and the sublang is 2 so let’s try:

LCID := (1024 * SubLang) + MajorLanguage;

Yep! That did it!

So, my friend over at 404.de probably has something like:
(1024 * 1 (de-DE)) + 7 (German)

1031

Interesting. I’d figured it had something to do with localization but I wasn’t sure.

I also found a MSDN blog that confirms all of this…
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/06/09/151689.aspx

Well, question answered.