Please go back and read the message I posted a few days ago about this issue: http://keithp.com/pipermail/fontconfig/2003-July/000528.html The problem is that you want both: en "contains" en_gb and zh_cn "contains" zh That way you can list both 'English fonts for Great Britian' and 'Chinese Fonts, regardless of territory'. If we get some experience that this semantic is correct, I can back-port that part of the recent change (leaving out the other changes in Listing semantics) to the 2.2 branch. So, we need some reports indicating that this is a good change... -keith