This Technical Report specifies description formats and functionality for the specification of cultural conventions, description formats for character sets, and description formats for binding character names to ISO/IEC 10646, plus a set of default values for some of these items. The specification is upward compatible with POSIX locale specifications - a locale conformant to POSIX specifications will also be conformant to specifications in this Technical Report, while the reverse condition will not hold. Some of the descriptions are intended to be coded in text files to be used via Application Programming Interfaces, that are expected to be developed for a number of systems which comply with ISO/IEC 9945. An alignment effort has been undertaken for this specification to be aligned with ISO/IEC 9945.