diff --git a/build_openwebtext_pretraining_dataset.py b/build_openwebtext_pretraining_dataset.py
index dd96368..9fd489a 100644
--- a/build_openwebtext_pretraining_dataset.py
+++ b/build_openwebtext_pretraining_dataset.py
@@ -44,7 +44,8 @@ def log(*args):
       max_seq_length=args.max_seq_length,
       num_jobs=args.num_processes,
       blanks_separate_docs=False,
-      do_lower_case=args.do_lower_case
+      do_lower_case=args.do_lower_case,
+      strip_accents=args.strip_accents,
   )
   log("Writing tf examples")
   fnames = sorted(tf.io.gfile.listdir(owt_dir))
@@ -79,11 +80,23 @@ def main():
                       help="Number of tokens per example.")
   parser.add_argument("--num-processes", default=1, type=int,
                       help="Parallelize across multiple processes.")
+
+  # toggle lower-case
   parser.add_argument("--do-lower-case", dest='do_lower_case',
                       action='store_true', help="Lower case input text.")
   parser.add_argument("--no-lower-case", dest='do_lower_case',
                       action='store_false', help="Don't lower case input text.")
+
+  # toggle strip-accents
+  parser.add_argument("--do-strip-accents", dest='strip_accents',
+                      action='store_true', help="Strip accents (default).")
+  parser.add_argument("--no-strip-accents", dest='strip_accents',
+                      action='store_false', help="Don't strip accents.")
+
+  # set defaults for toggles
   parser.set_defaults(do_lower_case=True)
+  parser.set_defaults(strip_accents=True)
+
   args = parser.parse_args()
 
   utils.rmkdir(os.path.join(args.data_dir, "pretrain_tfrecords"))
diff --git a/build_pretraining_dataset.py b/build_pretraining_dataset.py
index 547b4b1..29e3621 100644
--- a/build_pretraining_dataset.py
+++ b/build_pretraining_dataset.py
@@ -119,11 +119,12 @@ class ExampleWriter(object):
 
   def __init__(self, job_id, vocab_file, output_dir, max_seq_length,
                num_jobs, blanks_separate_docs, do_lower_case,
-               num_out_files=1000):
+               num_out_files=1000, strip_accents=True):
     self._blanks_separate_docs = blanks_separate_docs
     tokenizer = tokenization.FullTokenizer(
         vocab_file=vocab_file,
-        do_lower_case=do_lower_case)
+        do_lower_case=do_lower_case,
+        strip_accents=strip_accents)
     self._example_builder = ExampleBuilder(tokenizer, max_seq_length)
     self._writers = []
     for i in range(num_out_files):
@@ -171,7 +172,8 @@ def log(*args):
       max_seq_length=args.max_seq_length,
       num_jobs=args.num_processes,
       blanks_separate_docs=args.blanks_separate_docs,
-      do_lower_case=args.do_lower_case
+      do_lower_case=args.do_lower_case,
+      strip_accents=args.strip_accents,
   )
   log("Writing tf examples")
   fnames = sorted(tf.io.gfile.listdir(args.corpus_dir))
@@ -206,11 +208,23 @@ def main():
                       help="Parallelize across multiple processes.")
   parser.add_argument("--blanks-separate-docs", default=True, type=bool,
                       help="Whether blank lines indicate document boundaries.")
+
+  # toggle lower-case
   parser.add_argument("--do-lower-case", dest='do_lower_case',
                       action='store_true', help="Lower case input text.")
   parser.add_argument("--no-lower-case", dest='do_lower_case',
                       action='store_false', help="Don't lower case input text.")
+
+  # toggle strip-accents
+  parser.add_argument("--do-strip-accents", dest='strip_accents',
+                      action='store_true', help="Strip accents (default).")
+  parser.add_argument("--no-strip-accents", dest='strip_accents',
+                      action='store_false', help="Don't strip accents.")
+
+  # set defaults for toggles
   parser.set_defaults(do_lower_case=True)
+  parser.set_defaults(strip_accents=True)
+
   args = parser.parse_args()
 
   utils.rmkdir(args.output_dir)
diff --git a/model/tokenization.py b/model/tokenization.py
index b345256..2684369 100644
--- a/model/tokenization.py
+++ b/model/tokenization.py
@@ -112,10 +112,17 @@ def whitespace_tokenize(text):
 class FullTokenizer(object):
   """Runs end-to-end tokenziation."""
 
-  def __init__(self, vocab_file, do_lower_case=True):
+  def __init__(self, vocab_file, do_lower_case=True, strip_accents=True):
+    """Constructs a FullTokenizer.
+
+    Args:
+      vocab_file: The vocabulary file.
+      do_lower_case: Whether to lower case the input.
+      strip_accents: Whether to strip the accents.
+    """
     self.vocab = load_vocab(vocab_file)
     self.inv_vocab = {v: k for k, v in self.vocab.items()}
-    self.basic_tokenizer = BasicTokenizer(do_lower_case=do_lower_case)
+    self.basic_tokenizer = BasicTokenizer(do_lower_case=do_lower_case, strip_accents=strip_accents)
     self.wordpiece_tokenizer = WordpieceTokenizer(vocab=self.vocab)
 
   def tokenize(self, text):
@@ -136,13 +143,15 @@ def convert_ids_to_tokens(self, ids):
 class BasicTokenizer(object):
   """Runs basic tokenization (punctuation splitting, lower casing, etc.)."""
 
-  def __init__(self, do_lower_case=True):
+  def __init__(self, do_lower_case=True, strip_accents=True):
     """Constructs a BasicTokenizer.
 
     Args:
       do_lower_case: Whether to lower case the input.
+      strip_accents: Whether to strip the accents.
     """
     self.do_lower_case = do_lower_case
+    self.strip_accents = strip_accents
 
   def tokenize(self, text):
     """Tokenizes a piece of text."""
@@ -162,7 +171,8 @@ def tokenize(self, text):
     for token in orig_tokens:
       if self.do_lower_case:
         token = token.lower()
-        token = self._run_strip_accents(token)
+        if self.strip_accents:
+            token = self._run_strip_accents(token)
       split_tokens.extend(self._run_split_on_punc(token))
 
     output_tokens = whitespace_tokenize(" ".join(split_tokens))