The std::locale::name function provides very limited information about a locale. Such a name is platform- and compiler-dependent, and is useless for Boost.Locale. There is no way to change it, so for all locales created by Boost.Locale, name() returns the same value as name() for std::locale::classic().

Thus an additional facet was created, giving more precise information: boost::locale::info. It has the following member functions:

std::string name() – the full name of the locale, for example en_US.UTF-8
std::string language() – the ISO-639 language code of the current locale, for example "en".
std::string country() – the ISO-3166 country code of the current locale, for example "US".
std::string variant() – the variant of current locale, for example "euro".
std::string encoding() – the encoding used for char based strings, for example "UTF-8"
bool utf8() – a fast way to check whether the encoding is UTF-8.

For example:

cout << "The language code is " << std::use_facet<boost::locale::info>(some_locale).language() << endl;