The documentation of MessageFormat says: "The factory methods aren't necessary because <code>MessageFormat</code> doesn't require any complex setup for a given locale. In fact, <code>MessageFormat</code> doesn't implement any locale specific behavior at all." These statements aren't true, as evidenced by the setLocale and getLocale methods. MessageFormat creates other Format objects, and thus needs to be aware of its locale. It would therefore be good to have a constructor that lets callers pass in a locale.