diff --git a/History.txt b/History.txt
index b32f67a..552ea93 100644
--- a/History.txt
+++ b/History.txt
@@ -1,6 +1,7 @@
 == 0.6.0 / 2013-02-02
 
 * added per-language support for black- and whitelists (thanks to bobjflong)
+* fixed tokenization for UTF-8 strings (this is broken in Ruby 1.8.x!) (thanks to pdg)
 
 == 0.5.2 / 2012-02-25
 
diff --git a/lib/highscore/content.rb b/lib/highscore/content.rb
index bf265ef..8c8e64d 100644
--- a/lib/highscore/content.rb
+++ b/lib/highscore/content.rb
@@ -33,9 +33,13 @@ def initialize(content, wordlist = nil)
         :consonants => 0,
         :ignore_short_words => true,
         :ignore_case => false,
-        :word_pattern => /\w+/,
+        :word_pattern => /\p{Word}+/u,
         :stemming => false
       }
+      
+      if RUBY_VERSION =~ /^1\.8/
+        @emphasis[:word_pattern] = /\w+/
+      end
     end
 
     # configure ranking
diff --git a/test/highscore/test_content.rb b/test/highscore/test_content.rb
index 31f3a82..273e35f 100644
--- a/test/highscore/test_content.rb
+++ b/test/highscore/test_content.rb
@@ -1,4 +1,8 @@
-require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../test_highscore'
+# encoding: utf-8
+$:.unshift(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), %w{.. .. lib highscore}))
+require "content"
+require "test/unit"
+require 'rubygems'
 
 class TestContent < Highscore::TestCase
   def setup
@@ -29,6 +33,19 @@ def test_keywords_fixnum
     assert_equal 1, content.keywords.length
   end
 
+  def test_keywords_utf8
+    content = 'Schöne Grüße, caractères, русский'
+
+    content = Highscore::Content.new content
+    
+    if RUBY_VERSION =~ /^1\.8/
+      # Ruby 1.8 doesn't support correct tokenization
+      assert_equal 3, content.keywords.length
+    else
+      assert_equal 4, content.keywords.length
+    end
+  end
+
   def test_vowels_and_consonants
     keywords = 'foobar RubyGems'.keywords do
       set :vowels, 2
@@ -109,4 +126,5 @@ def test_language_english
   def test_language_german
     assert_equal :german, Highscore::Content.new("Das ist sicherlich ein deutscher Text!").language
   end
-end
\ No newline at end of file
+end
+