Umlauts not rendering in IE

Permalink January 14, 2013 at 4:20 AM

I am about to go nuts! Everything was fine until I thought about trying to speed up the site and uploaded a couple things and then immediately unloaded them. Now although everything is fine in Firefox and Opera but IE doesn't render the umlauts in text or in page titles correctly!!! I don't know how to fix this. Can anyone help?
This is in my header

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="<?php echo LANGUAGE?>">
<head>
       <?php   Loader::element('header_required'); ?>
        <title></title>
        <meta name="description" content="">
        <meta name="author" content="">
         <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; utf-8"/>
          <meta charset="utf-8">

This was always there before but at part of trying to upload Minify, I uploaded a different header_required.php into the root - and deleted again. I am wondering if that is the problem but I have deleted everything and deleted the cache. I can't put the page up till I can fix this. Please help!