Why are there neutral cultures for cultures with only one region specific culture?

Question

Why are there region specific cultures for neutral cultures with only one region specific culture?

Or flipped version...why are there neutral cultures when there's just one region specific culture?

E.g. russian or czech. For russian, you have ru and ru-RU. For czech, there is cs and cs-CZ. There is no other region specific culture for either czech or russian.

Why is .NET containing both cs and cs-CZ and not just one of them? The first one is not tied to any country, the second is tied to the Czech Republic... but there is no other czech speaking country.

cs and cs-CZ cultures should be identical so why having both of them specified?

(note: this also makes me wonder why is there just one russian specific culture. Wikipedia says there are many other countries where russia is widely spoken)

Answer 1

The existence of cultures, even in the technical sense for “culture” (a collection of cultural conventions, often called a “locale”) is a matter of definition. We should not confuse the concept of culture with particular sets of cultures defined in some context, like .NET. The concept of culture is open-ended by definition: it allows new cultures to be specified as desired.

Everyone and his brother could write a description of, say, ru-FI, to reflect the rules of Russian as spoken in Finland, if he thinks that they differ from those of ru−RU. (No difference comes into my mind now, but this does not mean that differences could not exist, in someone’s mind at least.) Whether such definition would get widely adopted (and possibly included into .NET) is a different matter.