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Asked: 2026-05-17T16:53:13+00:00

Does anyone know why latin1_swedish is the default for MySQL. It would seem to

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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 they are the best universal choice, but in this case it does not seem thats what they did.

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  1. Editorial Team

    As far as I can see, latin1 was the default character set in pre-multibyte times and it looks like that’s been continued, probably for reasons of downward compatibility (e.g. for older CREATE statements that didn’t specify a collation).

    From here:

    What 4.0 Did

    MySQL 4.0 (and earlier versions) only supported what amounted to a combined notion of the character set and collation with single-byte character encodings, which was specified at the server level. The default was latin1, which corresponds to a character set of latin1 and collation of latin1_swedish_ci in MySQL 4.1.

    As to why Swedish, I can only guess that it’s because MySQL AB is/was Swedish. I can’t see any other reason for choosing this collation, it comes with some specific sorting quirks (ÄÖÜ come after Z I think), but they are nowhere near an international standard.

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