To compile a locale in CentOS, do something like this:

root# localedef -c -f UTF-8 -i en_US en_US.utf8

To see all locales available, do this:

$ locale -a

To set locale, do something like this:

$ export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

To enable global utf-8 support, we can create a file /etc/sysconfig/i18n, and add the following:

LANG="en_US.UTF-8" 

The file /etc/sysconfig/i18n sets the default language, any supported languages, and the default system font. For example:

LANG="en_US.UTF-8" 
SUPPORTED="en_US.UTF-8:en_US:en" 
SYSFONT="latarcyrheb-sun16"