diff --git a/src/richtext/richtextxml.cpp b/src/richtext/richtextxml.cpp
index bcff1aa074..2d6df34af1 100644
--- a/src/richtext/richtextxml.cpp
+++ b/src/richtext/richtextxml.cpp
@@ -544,7 +544,10 @@ bool wxRichTextXMLHandler::DoSaveFile(wxRichTextBuffer *buffer, wxOutputStream&
     {
         if (m_encoding == wxT("<System>"))
         {
+#if wxUSE_INTL
             fileEncoding = wxLocale::GetSystemEncodingName();
+            // if !wxUSE_INTL, we fall back to UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1 below
+#endif
         }
         else
         {