diff --git a/doc/source/whatsnew/v1.0.0.rst b/doc/source/whatsnew/v1.0.0.rst
index ea52736cb11a7..cc33d1120b51e 100644
--- a/doc/source/whatsnew/v1.0.0.rst
+++ b/doc/source/whatsnew/v1.0.0.rst
@@ -239,6 +239,7 @@ Datetimelike
 - Bug in :class:`Week` with ``weekday`` incorrectly raising ``AttributeError`` instead of ``TypeError`` when adding or subtracting an invalid type (:issue:`28530`)
 - Bug in :class:`DataFrame` arithmetic operations when operating with a :class:`Series` with dtype `'timedelta64[ns]'` (:issue:`28049`)
 - Bug in :func:`pandas.core.groupby.generic.SeriesGroupBy.apply` raising ``ValueError`` when a column in the original DataFrame is a datetime and the column labels are not standard integers (:issue:`28247`)
+- Bug in :func:`pandas._config.localization.get_locales` where the ``locales -a`` encodes the locales list as windows-1252 (:issue:`23638`, :issue:`24760`, :issue:`27368`)
 
 Timedelta
 ^^^^^^^^^
diff --git a/pandas/_config/localization.py b/pandas/_config/localization.py
index 9f750d8447c6a..ba60b1e003004 100644
--- a/pandas/_config/localization.py
+++ b/pandas/_config/localization.py
@@ -145,7 +145,15 @@ def get_locales(prefix=None, normalize=True, locale_getter=_default_locale_gette
         raw_locales = raw_locales.split(b"\n")
         out_locales = []
         for x in raw_locales:
-            out_locales.append(str(x, encoding=options.display.encoding))
+            try:
+                out_locales.append(str(x, encoding=options.display.encoding))
+            except UnicodeError:
+                # 'locale -a' is used to populated 'raw_locales' and on
+                # Redhat 7 Linux (and maybe others) prints locale names
+                # using windows-1252 encoding.  Bug only triggered by
+                # a few special characters and when there is an
+                # extensive list of installed locales.
+                out_locales.append(str(x, encoding="windows-1252"))
 
     except TypeError:
         pass