The confusion appears to be that there's an English - Germany setting and a German - Germany setting, as you point out in this comment. You have to distinguish between countries and languages when requesting a date format. It's unfortunately just that complicated. Why? Because some people never learn another date style even if they prefer a different language. This isn't as much of a problem when dates are represented in a straightforward way, but some regions are really different and if travelling in a different country, you may want to borrow that country's date formats without changing the rest of your system language. It's equally possible that some date representations don't "translate" and so to properly support all date formats, languages may need to be overridden. I'm not saying it's obvious -- but then country restrictions were always man-made and rarely make sense in the first place. Personally, I blame languages named after countries. ;-)