icuSetCollate(...)
icuGetCollate(type = c("actual", "valid"))icuGetCollate, a character string describing the ICU locale
  in use (which may be reported as "ICU not in use").  The
  actual locale may be simpler than the requested locale: for
  example "da" rather than "da_DK": English locales are
  likely to report "root".
icuSetCollate can be used to tune the way collation is done.
  On other builds calling this function does nothing, with a warning.Possible arguments are
locale:"da_DK"
      giving the language and country whose collation rules are to be
      used.  If present, this should be the first argument.
case_first:"upper", "lower" or
      "default", asking for upper- or lower-case characters to be
      sorted first.  The default is usually lower-case first, but not in
      all languages (not under the default settings for Danish, for example).
alternate_handling:"non_ignorable" (primary strength) and
      "shifted" (quaternary strength).
strength:"primary", "secondary", "tertiary"
      (default), "quaternary" and "identical". 
french_collation:"on", "off"
      and "default".
normalization:"on" and "off" (default).  This affects the
      collation of composite characters.
case_level:"on" and "off" (default).
hiragana_quaternary:"on" (sort
      Hiragana first at quaternary level) and "off".
Only the first three are likely to be of interest except to those with a detailed understanding of collation and specialized requirements.
  Some special values are accepted for locale:
  
"none":
"ASCII":strcmp is used instead, which should sort byte-by-byte in
      (unsigned) numerical order.  (As from R 3.1.3.)
"default":
"", "root":
  For the specifications of real ICU locales, see
  http://userguide.icu-project.org/locale.  Note that ICU does not
  report that a locale is not supported, but falls back to its idea of
  best fit (which could be rather different and is reported by
  icuGetCollate("actual"), often "root").  Most English
  locales fall back to "root" as although e.g.\ifelse{latex}{\out{~}}{ } "en_GB" is
  a valid locale (at least on some platforms), it contains no special
  rules for collation.  Note that "C" is not a supported ICU locale.
  
  Some examples are case_level = "on", strength = "primary" to ignore
  accent differences and alternate_handling = "shifted" to ignore
  space and punctuation characters.
  
  Initially ICU will not be used for collation if the OS is set to use
  the C locale for collation.  Once this function is called with
  a value for locale, ICU will be used until it is called again
  with locale = "none".
  All customizations are reset to the default for the locale if
  locale is specified: the collation engine is reset if the
  OS collation locate category is changed by Sys.setlocale.
sort.  capabilities for whether ICU is available;
  extSoftVersion for its version.
The ICU user guide chapter on collation (http://userguide.icu-project.org/collation).