title: android determine if device is in right to left language/layout
body: <p>Is there a way to determine if the device is in a right to left language (something like Arabic) as opposed to something that's left to right (English)?</p>
  
  <p>Something compatible with older API levels (down to 10) is necessary</p>
  
  <p><strong>SOLUTION</strong></p>
  
  <p>i ended up using the xml method in the accepted answer. Farther down the line, i also added the code indicated here for instances where I didn't have access to getResources()</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18996183/identifying-rtl-language-in-android/23203698#23203698">Identifying RTL language in Android</a></p>
  
  <p><strong>more info</strong></p>
  
  <p>This question still gets a lot of traffic; something else I wanted to point out: When I originally asked this I think it was partially to help address showing different pointing chevrons in RTL vs LTR -- another slick way of accomplishing this is by placing drawable resources in the standard and <code>ldrtl</code> directories -- means no code required to determine which one to show!</p>