Translations:UTF-8/29/en
From Gentoo Wiki
There is one environment variable that needs to be set in order to use the new UTF-8 locales: LC_CTYPE (optionally modify the LANG variable to change the system language as well). There are also many different ways to set it; some system administrators prefer to only have a UTF-8 environment for a specific user, in which case they set them in their ~/.profile (/bin/sh for Bourne shell users), ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bashrc (/bin/bash for Bourne again shell users). More details and best practices can be found in the Localization Guide.