If you are for example dutch, german, swedisch, french or spanish you want more than just typing ascii characters. You might also want to use accents, such as the acute or grave accent, or the tilde as in the spanish ñ. For this purpose emacs has the concept of different input modes, in emacs there are called input methods.

The command list-input-methods shows a list of these input methods with their names. There are roughly two types of input methods:

1. input methods designed for a particular keyboard
2. prefix methods where you first type the accent and then the character: ~ + n becomes ñ
3. postfix methods where you first type the character and then the accent: n + ~ becomes ñ

Most postfix input methods use the "/" where you might expect a comma so that the input method does not interfere too much with normal typing.

As soon as you have chosen your input method from the list you can set the input method via its name using the command set-input-method.