Are there UNICODE String Literals in GCC?

Colm Toomey wrote in with this interesting programming question: "I'm curious about internationalisation support in linux. I can't find any information in the gcc (2.7) man pages about entering UNICODE string literals for example. You can do this in Visual C++ like this: L"some unicode text". This is very handy. Are there any programs out there that support UNICODE? e.g. UNICODE xterm (using one of the true type font servers?) How would I create a database of message codes <-> UNICODE strings."