Why is MySQL's default collation latin1_swedish_ci?

Question

What is the reasoning behind setting latin1_swedish_ci as the compiled default when other options seem much more reasonable, like latin1_general_ci

Answer 1

latin1_swedish_ci is a single byte character set, unlike utf8_general_ci.

Compared to latin1_general_ci it has support for a variety of extra characters used in European languages. So it’s a best choice if you don’t know what language you will be using, if you are constrained to use only single byte character sets.

Answer 2

The bloke who wrote it was co-head of a Swedish company.

Possibly for similar reasons, Microsoft SQL Server's default language us_english.