Why does MySQL use latin1_swedish_ci as the default?

Question

Does anyone know why latin1_swedish is the default for MySQL. It would seem to me that UTF-8 would be more compatible right?

Defaults are usually chosen because the

Answer 1

latin1 is the default character set. MySQL's latin1 is the same as the Windows cp1252 character set. This means it is the same as the official ISO 8859-1 or IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) latin1, except that IANA latin1 treats the code points between 0x80 and 0x9f as “undefined,” whereas cp1252, and therefore MySQL's latin1, assign characters for those positions.

from

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-we-sets.html

Might help you understand why.