special considerations for inserting odd characters with DBI?

[groups]

hey there,
i'm having a lot of trouble with inserting/retrieving special characters
into Oracle using DBI. Characters such as � end up as spaces in the table .
it doesn't fail, just changes them altogether, and if i go and manually
enter these characters into the table, they're returned as something else
(eg: � is returned as a regular 'e' when selecting from the table). Does
anyone have any ideas as to how to get around this problem? Code i'm using
to submit is posted below.
thanks,
claudia

 my $sth = $dbh->prepare(q{INSERT into KEYWORD (KEYWORD_ID, KEYWORD_NAME,
LANG) values (?, ?, ?)});
 foreach $word(@words) {
  $sth->execute($count, $word, $language);
  }
$sth->finish;