Locale Es Cr
Use when working with the Spanish (Costa Rica) locale (`es-CR`) — its endonym Español (Costa Rica), Latin script, left-to-right (LTR) direction, or spoken-population data. Reference data and translation guidance (register, grammar, idiom, typography) for this specific locale; see [[locale]] for general i18n/l10n concepts (BCP 47, plural rules, RTL) that apply across all locales.
Reference data for the Spanish (Costa Rica) locale — endonym Español (Costa Rica), written in the Latin script, left-to-right (LTR).
Identifiers
- BCP 47 tag:
es-CR - ISO 639-1:
es - ISO 639-3:
spa - Script: Latn (Latin)
- Region: CR (Costa Rica)
- Text direction: ltr — left-to-right (LTR)
Speakers (approximate)
- L1 (native): 4,900,000
- L2 (additional): 200,000
- L1+L2 (total): 5,100,000
Base locale
This is a regional variant of Locale Es 001 (Spanish), the base/macro locale for this language.
Pluralization
CLDR plural categories for this locale: one, many, other (3 forms).
- one —
n = 1(e.g. 1) - many —
e = 0 and i != 0 and i % 1000000 = 0 and v = 0 or e != 0..5(e.g. 1000000, …) - other — everything else (e.g. 0, 2~16, 100, 1000, …)
See Unicode Messageformat for writing plural messages using these categories.
Translating into this locale
Start from the general Spanish guidance in Locale Es 419 (grammar, register, and typography) and apply the following Costa Rican-specific points.
- Address: Costa Ricans commonly use "usted" even among friends and family, and informal "vos" in some speech. Products normally use "usted" or neutral "tú"; "usted" is the safest choice for consumer text.
- Vocabulary: "pura vida" is an everyday expression and a tourism brand, not a general translation of "OK"; "tico/tica" is the colloquial demonym. "Colón" is the currency (symbol ₡).
- Formats: use CLDR data for
es-CRnumber, date, and currency formatting, and do not assume Mexican separators.
Common pitfalls
- Using the address form, vocabulary, or number format of another region; confirm each against the target country.
- Writing spoken slang or dialect spellings in standard text.
- The general pitfalls in Locale Es 001 (word order, capitalization, false friends, and agreement) also apply here.
Learn more
- Locale for BCP 47 identifiers, locale-sensitive formatting, pluralization, and text-direction concepts that apply across all locales.
- Unicode Messageformat for writing plural/selection messages correctly for this locale's grammar.
- Real Academia Española and ASALE, Diccionario panhispánico de dudas and Ortografía de la lengua española (2010), https://www.rae.es
- Unicode CLDR locale data for number, date, and currency formats of each Spanish region (https://cldr.unicode.org)