I know this is an old post but I thought I would share my answer. We handle names from all over the world in our database. It came to my attention that we actually had names with a mixture of the Romanian diacritical characters and Latin diacritical characters. This cause the accepted answer to not work. Lucky for us we keep up to date on our SQL database and in 2019 version they introduced UTF8 versions of collations. What fixed our queries was to use Latin1_General_100_CI_AI_SC_UTF8 collation in the like clause and it now can find all that match even when the ascii values are what the user types in instead of the unicode. Example: "Ştefănuţ" finds all "Stefanut" and "Ştefănuţ" variations and vise versa.