This version uses the proper APIs to work with the locale's multibyte encoding (with single-byte encodings being a trivial case of multibyte). It will fail if it encounters an invalid byte sequence (e.g. byte > 127 in the "C" locale), though it could be changed to treat each rejected byte as a single character.

#include <locale.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <wchar.h>

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    size_t n = 12, totlen = 0, maxlen, chlen;

    setlocale(LC_ALL, "");

    if (argc != 2)
	return EXIT_FAILURE;

    maxlen = strlen(argv[1]);

    while (n--) {
	chlen = mbrlen(argv[1] + totlen, maxlen - totlen, NULL);
	if (chlen > MB_CUR_MAX)
	    return EXIT_FAILURE;
	totlen += chlen;
    }

    printf("%.*s\n", (int)totlen, argv[1]);
    return 0;
}