Comment # 13 on bug 1203464 from Stefan Hundhammer

Recently, I had a similar problem on my workstation. It turned out that on top
of the normal variables that you get with "locale", there was also $LANGUAGE
set which overrides many of those other variables.

On top of that, some program had also dumped a file ~/.pam_environment into my
home directory that also had overrides for the variables.

I don't know where they both come from; I suspect one of the login managers
(lightdm?) or the desktop-specific control center from Xfce or KDE. I find it
extremely user-unfriendly to change a user's preferences that way, even worse,
silently; but I don't know yet where this comes from.


Getting rid of both fixed the problem.