diff --git a/python-sphinxcontrib-programoutput.changes b/python-sphinxcontrib-programoutput.changes
index 10c04f5..e8e3717 100644
--- a/python-sphinxcontrib-programoutput.changes
+++ b/python-sphinxcontrib-programoutput.changes
@@ -1,3 +1,11 @@
+-------------------------------------------------------------------
+Wed Jun 19 07:28:43 UTC 2019 - Thomas Bechtold <tbechtold@suse.com>
+
+- export LANG=en_US.UTF-8 during %build and %install . This fixes
+  the build for older distros which fail with:
+  UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position \
+    1468: ordinal not in range(128)
+
 -------------------------------------------------------------------
 Tue Apr 23 11:54:16 UTC 2019 - Marketa Calabkova <mcalabkova@suse.com>
 
diff --git a/python-sphinxcontrib-programoutput.spec b/python-sphinxcontrib-programoutput.spec
index a367c59..8739e68 100644
--- a/python-sphinxcontrib-programoutput.spec
+++ b/python-sphinxcontrib-programoutput.spec
@@ -45,9 +45,11 @@ documents, helping you to keep your command examples up to date.
 %setup -q -n sphinxcontrib-programoutput-%{version}
 
 %build
+export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 %python_build
 
 %install
+export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 %python_install
 %python_expand %fdupes %{buildroot}%{$python_sitelib}