ok I was a bit worried by comments here https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/localepurge/
ie out-of-date/legacy BUT I decided to take the plunge
yay -S localepurge
result
Some new locales have appeared on your system:
de.UTF-8 fr.ISO8859-1 fr.UTF-8 jp pl.UTF-8 zh
They will not be touched until you reconfigure localepurge
with the following command:
/usr/bin/localepurge-config
localepurge: Disk space freed in /usr/share/locale: 318652 KiB
localepurge: Disk space freed in /usr/share/man: 3020 KiB
Total disk space freed by localepurge: 321672 KiB
Bit weird about those ‘new locales’ invading my system but I can sleep on that one…