I used to be able to copy&paste (or type if I load respective keyboard layout) any kind of characters (eg. é ö ñ ß و 好) in my console/terminal.

Now I bought a new computer and it does not work any more, only English/ASCII characters (but in other programs, e.g. firefox, it still works).

Distribution: Ubuntu. Terminals tried: gnome-terminal, xterm, konsole.

I tried setting LANGUAGE in /etc/environment to en_US.UTF-8 but after reboot echo $LANGUAGE still gives en. I also tried setting Character encoding to Unicode(UTF-8) in the gnome-terminal Terminal-menu

Question: How can I get a terminal that is able to deal with non-English characters?

I used to be able to copy&paste (or type if I load respective keyboard layout) any kind of characters (eg. é ö ñ ß و 好) in my console/terminal.

Now I bought a new computer and it does not work any more, only English/ASCII characters (but in other programs, e.g. firefox, it still works).

Distribution: Ubuntu. Terminals tried: gnome-terminal, xterm, konsole.

I tried setting LANG in /etc/environment to en_US.UTF-8 but after reboot echo $LANG still gives C. I also tried setting Character encoding to Unicode(UTF-8) in the gnome-terminal Terminal-menu - without effect.

Question: How can I get a terminal that is able to deal with non-English characters?