diff --git a/src/windows/common/wslutil.cpp b/src/windows/common/wslutil.cpp
index aeca79266..8d2136185 100644
--- a/src/windows/common/wslutil.cpp
+++ b/src/windows/common/wslutil.cpp
@@ -1363,8 +1363,15 @@ void wsl::windows::common::wslutil::SetCrtEncoding(int Mode)
     setMode(stdout, Mode);
     setMode(stderr, Mode);
 
-    // Set the locale to the current environment's default locale.
+    // Set the locale to the current environment's default locale for regional
+    // formatting (numeric, time, collation), then override LC_CTYPE to UTF-8
+    // so that narrow-to-wide conversions (e.g. %hs in wprintf) correctly decode
+    // UTF-8 multi-byte sequences from Linux/container processes.
     WI_VERIFY(_wsetlocale(LC_ALL, L"") != NULL);
+    if (Mode == _O_U8TEXT)
+    {
+        WI_VERIFY(_wsetlocale(LC_CTYPE, L".UTF-8") != NULL);
+    }
 }
 
 void wsl::windows::common::wslutil::SetThreadDescription(LPCWSTR Name)