Laravel localization in English English

Locale codes

Set the base locale in config/app.php. For regional variants, English commonly uses: en_US, en_GB, en_AU, en_CA, en_IN

// config/app.php
'locale' => 'en',
'fallback_locale' => 'en',

// Or switch at runtime
App::setLocale('en');

Plural rules: what English actually needs

CLDR defines 2 cardinal categories for English. The sample numbers below were computed by ICU for this exact locale:

Laravel's trans_choice() maps numbers to 2 pipe-separated forms for this locale:

// lang/en/messages.php
'items' => ':count item|:count items'

// Usage
trans_choice('messages.items', $count, ['count' => $count]);

Try any number live in the pluralization tester.

Localized dates with Carbon

Real output for English (en locale), generated by Carbon for March 21, 2026:

$date = now()->locale('en');

$date->translatedFormat('l, j F Y');
// "Saturday, 21 March 2026"

$date->isoFormat('LLLL');
// "Saturday, March 21, 2026 2:30 PM"

$date->isoFormat('L');
// "03/21/2026"

$date->subDays(3)->diffForHumans();
// "3 months ago"

What to watch out for in English

• Spelling differs between variants (color/colour, organize/organise); pick en_US or en_GB and stay consistent.
• Date order differs sharply by region: en_US uses month-day-year, en_GB uses day-month-year.
• Decimal point with comma as thousands separator (1,234.56).

Framework strings already translated

Laravel's own validation, auth and pagination strings are maintained in English by the open-source Laravel-Lang project (MIT). Install them, then manage your app's own strings live:

composer require laravel-lang/common --dev
php artisan lang:add en
php artisan lang:update