"Like other operating systems, GNU/Linux is starting to add increased support for international characters. The support is spotty in places, and varies between systems because of differences in keyboards, distributions, fonts, and program support. Even so, if you make a few configuration changes, you can use the keyboard to enter the characters for dozens of languages with only a few problems.
"Character encodings are usually called locales. The first locales were based on ASCII, originally a 128-character table created for modern English. ASCII was later expanded to 256 characters in order to support other European languages..."
