Ok, so here's the problem. I don't know what happened, or even when it started, but the accented characters in my keyboard stopped working. When you hold a letter, that would normally give you the option to select an accented character, the letter gets a little lip on the keypress preview. But there are no accents displayed, and they're not hidden there either.
I just noticed this today, but it may have been like this for a while. I did have the multitap keyboard installed (that makes it like a normal cell phone key pad) and the emoji keyboard enabled. could this be the problem?