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MAL: that doesn't answer my question, though: In what sense
does getdefaultlocale get a "default" locale? default as
opposed to what custom setting?

childsplay: the problem with adding additional aliases is
a) we can never hope to get a complete list of locales, so
this is a never-ending maintenance problem, and
b) the dictionary might be wrong on some systems. E.g.
sometimes, 'nb' might denote an ISO-8859-15 locale,  or a
UTF-8 locale (e.g. when UTF-8 becomes the standard encoding
on Unix some day). If so, Python will silently compute an
incorrect default - in particular wrt. the encoding of the
"default" locale.