[Tutor] How to find language name

[Michael Lange]

Hello tutors,

I'm struggling here with a problem trying to determine the current language name.
I need the ISO 639 style two letter abbreviations, like 'en' for english etc.
I tried using locale.getdefaultlocale() and it seems to do just what I want:

>>> import locale
>>> locale.getdefaultlocale()
['de_DE', 'de']
>>> locale.getlocale()
['de_DE', 'ISO8859-1']

It looks like I could just do:

langName = locale.getdefaultlocale()[1]

Unfortunately the documentation for the locale module confuses me at this point:

getdefaultlocale([envvars])

    Tries to determine the default locale settings and returns them as a tuple of the form (language code, encoding). 
                                                                                                           ^^^^^^^^
getlocale([category])

    Returns the current setting for the given locale category as sequence containing language code, encoding
                                                                                                    ^^^^^^^^
My question now, is the behavior of getdefaultlocale() platform specific, in other words, may it happen
that getdefaultlocale()[1] will be something like 'ISO8859-1' ? (BTW, my app is supposed to run on *nix systems
exclusively.)

Any hints are much appreciated. Thanks

Michael