diff --git a/src/common/intl.cpp b/src/common/intl.cpp
index 40c997970f..bac6f22053 100644
--- a/src/common/intl.cpp
+++ b/src/common/intl.cpp
@@ -2466,7 +2466,13 @@ wxFontEncoding wxLocale::GetSystemEncoding()
         // (a.k.a. US-ASCII) which is arguably a bug but keep it like this for
         // backwards compatibility and just take care to not return
         // wxFONTENCODING_DEFAULT from here as this surely doesn't make sense
-        if ( enc != wxFONTENCODING_MAX && enc != wxFONTENCODING_DEFAULT )
+        if ( enc == wxFONTENCODING_DEFAULT )
+        {
+            // we don't have wxFONTENCODING_ASCII, so use the closest one
+            return wxFONTENCODING_ISO8859_1;
+        }
+
+        if ( enc != wxFONTENCODING_MAX )
         {
             return enc;
         }