I had the same problem, only just on the root account and not the user account. I looked at the environments for both accounts and there was only one difference: LC_CTYPE=en_US Setting the above environment fixed the problem, though I don't know why.
make sure the locale is supported (font and encoding) by the terminal you are using (can confirm with the "locale" command). 8.0 uses UTF-8 and Unicode fonts for western European locales by default.