Specifies supported language, territory, and character set.

This parameter specifies the language in which messages appear, the territory and its conventions for calculating week and day numbers, and the character set displayed. Oracle Universal Installer sets this value during installation based on the language setting of the operating system.

The default value for NLS_LANG, if not set, is AMERICAN_AMERICA.US7ASCII.

There are other globalization parameters that can be set along NLS_LANG to override some values implicitly determined by NLS_LANG. These parameters are:

NLS_DATE_FORMAT
NLS_TIMESTAMP_FORMAT
NLS_TIMESTAMP_TZ_FORMAT
NLS_DATE_LANGUAGE
NLS_NUMERIC_CHARACTERS
NLS_CURRENCY
NLS_ISO_CURRENCY
NLS_DUAL_CURRENCY
NLS_SORT

The following parameters can also be set along NLS_LANG to determine globalization behavior that is independent from the value of NLS_LANG:

NLS_CALENDAR
NLS_COMP
NLS_NCHAR_CONV_EXCP
NLS_LENGTH_SEMANTICS