> Well, yes, but only because you are removing the @-modifiers. I don't
> think that's correct, since e.g. the string formatting used for
> numbers is different with the modifier.

All the @-modifiers except euro are applied to the locale, not the encoding. 
And Python removes all the @-modifiers, e.g. latin and cyrillic which specify 
the script.

> If you keep the modifiers, but move them to the end of the locale
> string you should get the correct behavior, e.g.
> 
> -    'sd':                                   'sd_IN@devanagari.UTF-8',
> +    'sd':                                   'sd_IN.UTF-8@devanagari',
> 
> (modulo perhaps the spelling of "UTF-8")

Recent the locale.alias file changes these entities:

sd:						sd_IN.UTF-8
sd_IN.utf8:					sd_IN.UTF-8
sd@devanagari:					sd_IN@devanagari.UTF-8
sd_IN@devanagari:				sd_IN@devanagari.UTF-8
sd_IN@devanagari.utf8:				sd_IN@devanagari.UTF-8