The default encoding for new Debian GNU/Linux installations is UTF-8. A number of applications will also be set up to use UTF-8 by default. What that means is that Debian (and Ubuntu, Mint, and many other) are utf-8 capable by default.

What is the default encoding in Linux?

Linux represents Unicode using the 8-bit Unicode Transformation Format (UTF-8). UTF-8 is a variable length encoding of Unicode. It uses 1 byte to code 7 bits, 2 bytes for 11 bits, 3 bytes for 16 bits, 4 bytes for 21 bits, 5 bytes for 26 bits, 6 bytes for 31 bits.

What is the default character encoding?

ASCII was the first character encoding standard. ASCII defined 128 different characters that could be used on the internet: numbers (0-9), English letters (A-Z), and some special characters like ! $ + – ( ) @ < > . ISO-8859-1 was the default character set for HTML 4.