Thanks for this. Something (not quite sure what) caused my locale file here to be a 0-length file. locale-gen and the like were not fixing the issue and I was a hair away from a reflash before I saw this.

I'm thinking I may still do a reflash, since I'm not sure what else may have been borked (and its been a couple years since I did a reflash). But at least right now I have a working system again and can do the reflash on my own time.