unicode support

Could someone give me any recommendations regarding unicode strings in eclipse/g++ projects for nios II. There seems to be no unicode support at all. In eclipse I can only use plain ascii files, no utf-8 or utf-16. The compiler does not handle unicode source files either. Even with ascii files one gets a compilation error when using characters like è or ä. The only way to store characters beyond 0x7f is an escape sequence, e.g. L"All\x00f4"?