If you have to store and retrieve characters of any other language besides English in SQL Server, you must do the following –

1. Use a Unicode compatible data type for the table column. NVACHAR, NCHAR, NTEXT are the datatypes in SQL Server that can be used for storing non-English characters.
2. Precede the Unicode data values with an N (capital letter) to let the SQL Server know that the following data is from Unicode character set. Without the N prefix, the string is converted to the default code page of the database. This default code page may not recognize certain characters.
3. The N should be used even in the WHERE clause.

If the correct data-type is not used or the data is not preceded with an N, SQL Server will save the data to the table as ‘?’ or another garbled character.

The following scripts demonstrate saving and retrieving multi-lingual data to and from SQL Server. I have used Google Translate to get the characters of other languages. I left out far-east languages like Japanese and Chinese from the following example on purpose because those languages have a few other considerations that I’ll save for another blog post.

DROP TABLE dbo.unicodeData;
GO

CREATE TABLE dbo.unicodeData
( languageUsed VARCHAR(50)
, unicodeData NVARCHAR(200)
, nonUnicodeData VARCHAR(200) -- same data in a normal VARCHAR column for comparison
, comments VARCHAR(100)
);
GO

INSERT INTO dbo.unicodeData
( languageUsed
, unicodeData
, nonUnicodeData
, comments)
VALUES
('English'
, N'This is an example'
, N'This is an example'
, NULL)

,('Hindi'
, N'यह एक उदाहरण है.'
, N'यह एक उदाहरण है.'
, 'Using the preceding N in both strings but VARCHAR is still a ?')

,('Hindi'
, 'यह एक उदाहरण है.'
, 'यह एक उदाहरण है.'
, 'Not using the preceding N in both strings so both are a ?')

,('Kannada'
, N'ಈ ಒಂದು ಉದಾಹರಣೆಯಾಗಿದೆ.'
, N'ಈ ಒಂದು ಉದಾಹರಣೆಯಾಗಿದೆ.'
, NULL)

,('Arabic'
, N'هذا مثال على ذلك.'
, N'هذا مثال على ذلك.'
, NULL)

,('Czech'
, N'To je příklad.'
, N'To je příklad.'
, NULL);
GO

SELECT *
FROM dbo.unicodeData;
GO

-- Example of using N' in the WHERE clause
SELECT *
FROM dbo.unicodeData
WHERE unicodeData like N'%एक%';

Further Reading:

• nchar and nvarchar (Transact-SQL)
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms186939.aspx
• Collation and Unicode Support
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143726.aspx