diff --git a/lib/Template/Plugin/Date.pm b/lib/Template/Plugin/Date.pm
index f94c5d8a..27a54185 100644
--- a/lib/Template/Plugin/Date.pm
+++ b/lib/Template/Plugin/Date.pm
@@ -32,7 +32,7 @@ use constant HAS_SETLOCALE => $Config::Config{d_setlocale};
 
 our $VERSION = '3.106';
 our $FORMAT  = '%H:%M:%S %d-%b-%Y';    # default strftime() format
-our @LOCALE_SUFFIX = qw( .ISO8859-1 .ISO_8859-15 .US-ASCII .UTF-8 );
+our @LOCALE_SUFFIX = qw( .UTF-8 .ISO8859-1 .ISO_8859-15 .US-ASCII );
 
 
 #------------------------------------------------------------------------
@@ -164,7 +164,7 @@ sub format {
             : undef;
 
         # some systems expect locales to have a particular suffix
-        for my $suffix ('', @LOCALE_SUFFIX) {
+        for my $suffix (@LOCALE_SUFFIX, '') {
             my $try_locale = $locale.$suffix;
             my $setlocale = HAS_SETLOCALE
                 ? &POSIX::setlocale(&POSIX::LC_ALL, $try_locale)
diff --git a/t/date.t b/t/date.t
index 125b6cbd..119083c0 100644
--- a/t/date.t
+++ b/t/date.t
@@ -63,7 +63,7 @@ sub time_locale {
                    : undef;
     
     # some systems expect locales to have a particular suffix
-    for my $suffix ('', @Template::Plugin::Date::LOCALE_SUFFIX) {
+    for my $suffix (@Template::Plugin::Date::LOCALE_SUFFIX, '') {
         my $try_locale = $locale.$suffix;
 	    my $setlocale = $Config{d_setlocale}
                           ? &POSIX::setlocale(&POSIX::LC_ALL, $try_locale)