getlocale() is supposed to (?) return a locale two-tuple in a platform-specific notation. However, in *Windows* 7 64, with Python 3.4, 3.3 and 2.7 a *unix-like*, abbreviated, lang_territory notation is used for french, german, portuguese, spanish. In other words: In these four cases, the output of setlocale is not equal to ".".join(locale.getlocale())

## Code that demonstrates the differences
from __future__ import print_function
import locale
import collections
import pprint

languages = ("chinese czech danish dutch english finnish french german greek "
             "hungarian icelandic italian japanese korean norwegian polish "
             "portuguese russian slovak spanish swedish turkish")
d = collections.defaultdict(list)
t = collections.namedtuple("Locale", "lang setlocale getlocale")
for language in languages.split():
    sloc = locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, language)
    gloc = locale.getlocale()
    record = t(language, sloc, gloc)
    if gloc[0][2] == "_":
        d["unix-like"].append(record)
    else:
        d["windows-like"].append(record)
     
pprint.pprint(dict(d))

## output
n:\>C:\Miniconda3\python.exe N:\temp\loc.py
-------------------------------------------------------------
{'unix-like': [Locale(lang='french', setlocale='French_France.1252', getlocale=('fr_FR', 'cp1252')),
               Locale(lang='german', setlocale='German_Germany.1252', getlocale=('de_DE', 'cp1252')),
               Locale(lang='portuguese', setlocale='Portuguese_Brazil.1252', getlocale=('pt_BR', 'cp1252')),
               Locale(lang='spanish', setlocale='Spanish_Spain.1252', getlocale=('es_ES', 'cp1252'))],
-------------------------------------------------------------
 'windows-like': [Locale(lang='chinese', setlocale="Chinese (Simplified)_People's Republic of China.936", getlocale=("Chinese (Simplified)_People's Republic of China", '936')),
                  Locale(lang='czech', setlocale='Czech_Czech Republic.1250', getlocale=('Czech_Czech Republic', '1250')),
                  Locale(lang='danish', setlocale='Danish_Denmark.1252', getlocale=('Danish_Denmark', '1252')),
                  Locale(lang='dutch', setlocale='Dutch_Netherlands.1252', getlocale=('Dutch_Netherlands', '1252')),
                  Locale(lang='english', setlocale='English_United States.1252', getlocale=('English_United States', '1252')),
                  Locale(lang='finnish', setlocale='Finnish_Finland.1252', getlocale=('Finnish_Finland', '1252')),
                  Locale(lang='greek', setlocale='Greek_Greece.1253', getlocale=('Greek_Greece', '1253')),
                  Locale(lang='hungarian', setlocale='Hungarian_Hungary.1250', getlocale=('Hungarian_Hungary', '1250')),
                  Locale(lang='icelandic', setlocale='Icelandic_Iceland.1252', getlocale=('Icelandic_Iceland', '1252')),
                  Locale(lang='italian', setlocale='Italian_Italy.1252', getlocale=('Italian_Italy', '1252')),
                  Locale(lang='japanese', setlocale='Japanese_Japan.932', getlocale=('Japanese_Japan', '932')),
                  Locale(lang='korean', setlocale='Korean_Korea.949', getlocale=('Korean_Korea', '949')),
                  Locale(lang='norwegian', setlocale='Norwegian (Bokmål)_Norway.1252', getlocale=('Norwegian (Bokmål)_Norway', '1252')),
                  Locale(lang='polish', setlocale='Polish_Poland.1250', getlocale=('Polish_Poland', '1250')),
                  Locale(lang='russian', setlocale='Russian_Russia.1251', getlocale=('Russian_Russia', '1251')),
                  Locale(lang='slovak', setlocale='Slovak_Slovakia.1250', getlocale=('Slovak_Slovakia', '1250')),
                  Locale(lang='swedish', setlocale='Swedish_Sweden.1252', getlocale=('Swedish_Sweden', '1252')),
                  Locale(lang='turkish', setlocale='Turkish_Turkey.1254', getlocale=('Turkish_Turkey', '1254'))]}