Sorry but that's like selling someone a car and saying "Oh you want the chassis to be made of metal instead of wood? Well you can change that can't you."
I disagree. If you're building something from the start, you decide on a good character set, and use it. Namely Unicode. It's a lot easier to do that than to try and fix things afterwards.
Look at php. Dealing with Unicode in php is a major hassle because it wasn't designed from the ground up to support Unicode. It was added in later as a library. So now you have special functions for dealing with unicode, and all the hassle and verbosity that entails in your code.
In Javascript or Java however, Unicode just works universally.
I'd say choosing a character set is one of the first things you should do as a language designer - that's why I was surprised with the lack of support for anything but ascii which just doesn't cut it any more for real world applications.
Saying that adding Unicode is a couple of days work for anyone interested sounds like a recipe for absolute disaster - see how php turned out.