how to mimic which language?

[Joshua N Pritikin]

i need to do some translation lookups outside of gettext.  Even so, i want to
preserve the configuration mechanism as much as possible.  For example:

  LC_ALL=en_US.utf8 LANGUAGE=mr ./redael

In this case, en_US.utf8 is the locale but text is rendered in Marathi (mr)
if available.  Is there a library call to mimic this logic?

  g_warning ("locale=%s", setlocale (LC_MESSAGES, NULL));

This returns only "locale=en_US.utf8", ignoring the GNU extension "LANGUAGE".  
Is
there another library call to iterate through the possible locales from most
specific to most general?  Or do i need to cut & paste the logic from
dcigettext.c?

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