Use a Unicode byte order mark in your Perl script files instead.

As perldoc utf8 explains…

Because it is not possible to reliably tell UTF-8 from native 8 bit encodings, you need either a Byte Order Mark at the beginning of your source code, or "use utf8;", to instruct perl.

You can't bequeath or inherit Perl's comprehension of a source code file's character encoding to or from another file because the two files might be in two different encodings.

Jim