How to change the language (locale) for the Ubuntu terminal?

Question

I would like to be able to use ASCII characters in my terminal éùòà.

This is my locale:

% locale                                               :( 1 14-12-09 - 14:13:17
LANG=
LANGUAGE=en_CA:en
LC_CTYPE=
LC_NUMERIC="POSIX"
LC_TIME="POSIX"
LC_COLLATE="POSIX"
LC_MONETARY="POSIX"
LC_MESSAGES="POSIX"
LC_PAPER="POSIX"
LC_NAME="POSIX"
LC_ADDRESS="POSIX"
LC_TELEPHONE="POSIX"
LC_MEASUREMENT="POSIX"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="POSIX"
LC_ALL=

In my locale file:

% cat /etc/default/locale                                   14-12-09 - 14:13:24
LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8
#LANGUAGE="en_CA:en"


% locale -a                                                 14-12-09 - 14:25:42
C
C.UTF-8
POSIX
de_CH.utf8
en_AG
en_AG.utf8
en_AU.utf8
en_BW.utf8
en_CA
en_CA.iso88591
en_CA.utf8
en_DK.utf8
en_GB.utf8
en_HK.utf8
en_IE.utf8
en_IN
en_IN.utf8
en_NG
en_NG.utf8
en_NZ.utf8
en_PH.utf8
en_SG.utf8
en_US.utf8
en_ZA.utf8
en_ZM
en_ZM.utf8
en_ZW.utf8
fr_CA
fr_CA.iso88591
fr_CA.utf8
fr_FR
fr_FR.iso88591
fr_FR.utf8
pt_BR.utf8

The original locale on my system was #LANGUAGE="en_CA:en".

• Why is it that when I added the French locale it changed the variable
  from LANGUAGE to LANG?

---

Previously this is the step I did in order to set my locale:

sudo locale-gen fr_FR
sudo locale-gen fr_FR.UTF-8
sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales
sudo update-locale LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8

My supported locale

        % check-language-support                                    14-12-09 - 14:14:02
        hunspell-en-ca kde-l10n-engb libreoffice-help-en-gb 
    libreoffice-l10n-en-gb libreoffice-l10n-en-za mythes-en-au 
thunderbird-locale-en-gb

% cat /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local                    14-12-09 - 14:20:54
en_CA.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
fr_CA ISO-8859-1
fr_CA.UTF-8 UTF-8
pt_BR.UTF-8 UTF-8
fr_FR ISO-8859-1
fr_FR.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_CA ISO-8859-1

And I logged out and logged back in, but any ASCII characters I put in my terminal doesn't work.