Thank you, Mangojack for the tip,
very useful but it would make things a lot more complicated since the list.value is used to search in the db, i.e. I would have to maintain two parallel lists (with anywhere from 500 to 5000 entries).
Also depending on the typeface and language used, there could be hundreds of letters (UTF-8) concerned and I don't know the sorting rules for the other languages. I only know English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Swedish and I don't know what constitutes an accent in Slovak or in the Cyrillic font.
In French é comes immediately after e, but in Swedish Å comes at the end of the alphabet.
Maybe there is a java library out there that can handle this dilemma.
Best, john m.