By default, UTF-8 is disabled in Slackware for greater backwards compatibility with programs that do not yet support it.
To enable it, edit /etc/profile.d/lang.sh and add:
export LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
Where en_GB is whatever language you use.
Be aware, you will also probably need to change the default terminal font to a Unicode one, and you're going to have to rename any directories or files that use characters from the ISO 8859-* sets that are not part of the 'core' ASCII characters - e.g. any accented characters. GTK2 and QT based programs should be fine, as well as any that call directly XFT.
Also, the console support for unicode is rather poor at the moment, it's more useful in X. There are also other problems associated with Unicode (evaultions in scripts, etc) that you should be aware of before switching.
man requires you to use an alias to work properly (otherwise it displays very strange characters):
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