locales and coding systems

[brownh@hartford-hwp.com (Haines Brown)]

I'm floundering and need a little guidance.

I'm running emacs 21.2.1 on debian 3.0, and the default coding system
is utf-16. That is, when I save any file in emacs having an accented
character, it doubles in size and is a 16-bit file.

The problem with this is that none of my other apps can cope with
that. Nedit, for exmaple, can't read it. My browser also can't
cope. What I need is to have all my files 8-bit.

The default coding system in emacs is determined by how I've set up
locales in debian. I went back to my installation notes, and according
to them, I had set the locale to utf-8.

How do I find out what coding system I'm currently using? When I run #
locale, all I get is LANG=POSIX, etc. If I run # locale -a, all I get
is POXIX and C. Apparently I'm climbing the wrong tree.

If my coding system turns out to be utf-16, how do I change it to
utf-8? 

If it is presently utf-8, why does emacs default to utf-16? 

Haines Brown