Some European languages use accented letters and other special symbols.
The ISO 8859 Latin-1 character set defines character codes for many European languages in the range 160 to 255. Emacs can display those characters according to Latin-1, provided the terminal or font in use supports them. To do this, load the library iso-ascii . Some operating systems let you specify the language you are using by setting a locale. You can use ISO Accents mode.